Salvadorean Temporary Residents Are Not Being Deported, Only Stripped Of Special Status. For Now.

Crime, Economy, Homeland Security, Human Accomplishment, IMMIGRATION

On January 8th, 2018, “the United States’ Department of Homeland Security had announced that it would end temporary protected status (TPS) for nearly 200,000 Salvadoreans who got” a generous grant of privilege from the US government in the late 1990s:

… permission to live and work in the country after a pair of earthquakes struck El Salvador in 2001. the United States’ Department of Homeland Security had announced that it would end temporary protected status (TPS) for nearly 200,000 Salvadoreans who got permission to live and work in the country after a pair of earthquakes struck El Salvador in 2001. .. The Salvadoreans are not alone. Smaller numbers of Hondurans and Nicaraguans were granted TPS after Hurricane Mitch wreaked havoc in 1998 (see chart).

… Citizens of all three Central American countries had their status renewed every 18 months for nearly two decades. Donald Trump, who promised to get tough on immigrants when he was campaigning for president, has found TPS a convenient way to keep that pledge.

Ditto “Haitians who were stranded after an earthquake in 2010.” Hondurans may be next.

To emphasize, Salvadorean temporary residents are not yet being deported (I doubt they ever will); only stripped of special status.

One wonders: Is the revoking of temporary protected status (TPS) for central Americans an easy issue on which to appear tough on immigration?

Wondering whether El Salvador a shithole country? Of course not. No unless you consider the following facts a hallmark of shittyness:

* It’s gang-ridden, home to MS-13, which has branches across America.
* Its GDP is pitiful. In fact, “Remittances from Salvadoreans living in the United States account for a colossal 17% of GDP.”
* “[M]ore than 40% of workers are underemployed and two-thirds are in the informal sector. The economy creates 11,000 jobs a year for the 60,000 people who enter the workforce.”

But hey, “192,000 Salvadoreans children were born in the United States.” This means they can bring in those who may have to leave and many more. And in any case, “around half of the 195,000 Salvadorean TPS holders will be eligible to apply for permanent residence.”

So the question asked above is answered: TPS revocation represents more political optics than authentic change for Americans.

How much exactly do the American people’s legislators care about the  American people?

Enough to write “four proposed bills [which] would offer permanent residency to temporary protected status holders from El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras and Nicaragua. Some of those have bipartisan support.”

That’s how much!

MORE in The Economist.

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NEW COLUMN: Trump’s ‘S-ithole’ Controversy Deconstructed (Part 1)

Africa, Donald Trump, IMMIGRATION, Race, The West

“Trump’s ‘Shithole’ Controversy Deconstructed (Part 1)” is the current column, now on Townhall.com (WND.com, Storia.me, Constitution.com, etc.):

President Trump’s questioning of immigration into the United States from what he crudely called “s-ithole” countries masks a more vexing question:

What makes a country, the place or the people? Does “the country” create the man or does the man make the country?

To listen to the deformed logic of the president’s detractors, it’s the former: the “country” makes the person. No sooner does an African or Haitian immigrant wash up on American shores—thanks to random quotas and set-asides, lotteries and other government grants of privilege and protection—than the process of cultural and philosophical osmosis begins. American probity and productivity soon become his own.

As an African libertarian—an ex-South African, to be precise—I took the liberty of addressing the matter in the book “Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” in which a Cameroonian scholar, Daniel Etounga-Manguelle, among others, is extensively cited.

Easily one of the most controversial thinkers on the causes of underdevelopment in Africa, Etounga-Manguelle, a former adviser to the World Bank, contends that “What Africans are doing to one another defies credulity. Genocide, bloody civil wars, and rampant violent crime suggest African societies at all social levels are to some extent cannibalistic.” Why so? In part, because of the inveterate values held by so many Africans.

Etounga-Manguelle and scholars like him, cited in “Into The Cannibal’s Pot,” are responding to an “explanatory vacuum” that has opened up among honest academics.

All have been willing to admit that constructs like racism, discrimination, and colonialism no longer serve as credible causal factors in divining underdevelopment and delinquency.

None has been called upon to enlighten the greater public.

In such intellectually candid circles, the intellectual “vacuum” is being filled with reference to culture, namely the “values, attitudes, beliefs, orientations, and underlying assumptions prevalent among people in a society.”

The idea that culture is benign and harmonious if not disrupted is a delusion, argues anthropologist Robert B. Edgerton, who also believes that in Africa, “traditional cultural values are at the root of poverty, authoritarianism, and injustice.”

By taking account of culture, posits David Landes, a Harvard economic historian, and author of The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, one could have foreseen the postwar economic success of Japan and Germany. The same is true of South Korea (versus Turkey), and Indonesia (versus Nigeria).

Before the end of free speech on American campuses, Etounga-Manguelle, aforementioned, attended a symposium on “Cultural Values and Human Progress” at Harvard, circa 1999. He had come to bury and not praise the cultures of his Continent. …

READ THE REST. “Trump’s ‘Shithole’ Controversy Deconstructed (Part 1)” is the current column, now on Townhall.com.

Read the weekly column on WND.com, The Unz Review, Storia.me, Constitution.com, and other outlets. Sign up to receive my weekly column, now in its 19th year, here: http://www.ilanamercer.com/mailing-list/.  Catch up @ ilanamercer.com.

UPDATED (2/2/018): Reversion To The Neoconservative Mean On Immigration & In Commentary? Sure Looks Like It.

Donald Trump, IMMIGRATION, Israel, Media, Neoconservatism

Look, the establishment has never been on the same page as the people when it comes to immigration. So, to talk about a reversion to the neoconservative mean is probably slightly inaccurate. But in 2016, when Candidate Trump was in full Deplorable mode, Fox News would have been less neoconservative on immigration. However, as Fox News shifts back to its neoconservative happy place, no discussion of an immigration moratorium will percolate through the noise on that channel (other than on the great Tucker Carlson’s show).

Duly, on January 9, I believe it was, neoconservative broadcaster Tammy Bruce insisted that not sending home Salvadorians temporarily in the US prevents others—Mexicans, Filipinos, Yemenis, in Bruce’s words—from entering the United States. LEGALLY. All this unfolded on The Story with Martha MacCallum.

No doubt, President Trump has shifted the immigration debate immeasurably. But I suspect the consensus in the immigration debate will begin to shift back to the pre-Trump era, as Bruce’s imbecilic quip indicates.

Although an immigration moratorium is desperately needed, at one million individuals a year—legal immigration will continue to be touted as the American Way. The ONLY way. The objection being to illegal immigration only, and not to the transformative powers of mass immigration.

Foreign policy has certainly seen the normalization of neoconservatism, echoed in the hiring by Breitbart of Jerusalem Post columnist Caroline Glick. Glick, whose writing I’m unable to plow through, is hardly an America Firster. However, Deplorables, apparently, need schooling from an Israel First, war-war-monger.

I say this as the quintessential (probably the original ), pro-Israel,  America First, libertarian, Jewish writer. See “The Titan is Tired,” for an example.

Here’s my critique of Glick’s weak One-State solution gibberish: “One State: Is It The Solution Or The Final Solution To The Jewish State?“

UPDATE I (2/2/018): It’s spreading, or taking hold again: the neoconservative blight, evinced in “Trump Is Echoing Talleyrand In His Middle East Diplomacy. That’s Right. Talleyrand”:

Talleyrand? Wasn’t he a slightly diluted, cunning Jacobin, responsible for anti-clergy moves during the French Revolution, which was 100 percent the antithesis of the American Revolution? Indeed, conservatives are duped by and enamored of the modern-day Jacobins.

UPDATE II (3/26):

Bolton:

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Toilet Tidbits About America’s Favorite Immigrant Groups

America, China, Culture, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Etiquette, IMMIGRATION, Multiculturalism, Technology, The West

“Labour of lavs”* is a delightfully titled article in The Economist (an excellent source of global news for those of us who’re sick of the cesspool that is the American media, Left and Right).

“… In the past few decades China has done a fairly good job of supplying basic sanitation. Only 2% of Chinese still do their business in the bushes, compared with 40% in India; three-quarters have access to toilets which the World Health Organisation deems acceptable, up from less than two-thirds in 2000. But about 70m still use shared facilities, and 260m continue to rely on bucket loos, open pits and other grungy facilities. Some are literally lethal: last month police traced a huge blast in the port city of Ningbo, which killed two people, back to an exploding septic tank. …”

If toilet habits are so abysmal in China, just imagine what these are like in India.

MORE in “Labour of lavs.“

* A combination of “lavatory” and the phrase a labor of love. The image is of a typical Chinese toilet.