Month: April 2022

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

The illegal immigrant population in the United States increased by one million in President Joe Biden’s first year in office, according to a new report.

At the end of 2021, 15.5 million illegal aliens were residing in the country, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) estimated.

After rolling back key Trump-era policies, Biden presided over the largest number of apprehensions of illegal immigrants at the U.S.–Mexico border in a calendar year in history. Almost 1.9 million arrests were recorded.

“Massive numbers of illegal aliens are coming into the United States and they’re staying here,” Spencer Raley, research director at FAIR and author of the new report, told The Epoch Times.

The state with the most illegal immigrants, according to the new estimate, is California, with 3.2 million. Texas has 2.2 million, Florida has 1.1 million, and New York has 1 million.

At the bottom of the list are West Virginia, North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, and South Dakota—all with under 10,000 illegal aliens.

The cost to taxpayers was estimated at $143 billion, up some $9 billion from a year prior when FAIR last released an estimate.

The group, which promotes policies that would reduce legal and illegal immigration in order to let America “manage growth, address environmental concerns, and maintain a high quality of life,” reached the figure by using Census Bureau data to calculate the total number of foreign-born residents presumed to be living in the United States.

After subtracting the total number of lawfully present immigrants, they add 30 percent to the total because of assumed underestimation.

Other groups use different methods to calculate the illegal immigrant population, which can’t be definitively ascertained because some escape detection.

Yale researchers pegged the population at around 22 million as of 2016. Edward Kaplan, one of the researchers, more recently estimated the population at approximately 20 million.

The Department of Homeland Security, meanwhile, said in its latest estimate (pdf) that as of Jan. 1, 2018, roughly 11.4 million illegal aliens were residing in the country, unchanged from their estimate three years prior. And Pew Research estimated just 10.5 million illegal immigrants were living in the country in 2017.

Whatever the number, it has likely increased in recent months as the Biden administration repeatedly loosens both border enforcement measures and policies aimed at locating illegal immigrants for deportation.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, a Biden appointee, has in a series of memorandums curtailed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from detaining and moving to deport aliens.

The guidelines are based in part on the principle that “many individuals who are unlawfully present in the United States have been contributing members to this country,” Mayorkas told the House Judiciary Committee in Washington on April 28.

The administration “has effectively abolished” ICE and is preventing Customs and Border Protection, which includes Border Patrol, from securing the southern border, FAIR said in its report.

Still, there are other factors at play, as the illegal alien population also increased during the Trump administration.

Per FAIR estimates, the population rose by two million across President Donald Trump’s four years in office.

If the increase under Biden continues apace, it would reach double that over four years.

“During the Trump administration, we did see a significant increase in the illegal alien population, but we never saw it to this degree,” Raley said.

A strong economy draws illegal aliens who want jobs, according to FAIR. Portions of the economy have recovered from the widespread lockdowns in 2020, but still haven’t reached pre-pandemic levels.

Proposed solutions include reinstating fully many of the more successful Trump-era border policies such as the “Remain in Mexico” program.

That approach “would have to be supplemented by enforcement mechanisms inside the country,” Raley said. “You would have to crack down on employers, which would probably entice a lot of illegal aliens to go home on their own accord, because the things that brought them here are no longer available. But you would also have to get serious again about taking the handcuffs off ICE and letting them apprehend immigration lawbreakers and ultimately remove them.”

Though it’s perhaps early to speculate too much, it’s looking like the Group of 20 summit scheduled to take place in November looks to get very awkward very fast. First, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenksy announced Wednesday that he’s been formally invited to the G-20 which will be hosted in Bali, Indonesia.

“Had talks with [Indonesian President Joko Widodo]. Thanked for the support of [Ukrainian] sovereignty and territorial integrity, in particular for a clear position in the UN. Food security issues were discussed. Appreciate inviting me to the G-20 summit,” Zelensky tweeted earlier in the week. President Widodo is currently serving as the G-20 chairman.

And on Friday, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin too has been confirmed to have been invited: “Putin confirmed in a phone call with Widodo he would participate in the summit, due to take place on Bali island, the Indonesian president said in a live-streamed address” – given also Russia is a longstanding G-20 member.

However, this doesn’t necessarily mean the Russian leader will participate in person, which isn’t known at this point, as Bloomberg describes of fresh Kremlin statements:

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined to say whether Putin would attend in person. While Russia is preparing for the summit in Bali, it’s “premature” to discuss details of its participation, he told reporters on a conference call Friday, responding to questions about the possibility of a meeting with Zelenskiy there.

President Joe Biden has previously called for Russia’s formal removal from the G-20, following on the precedent of its eviction from the Group of Eight in March 2014, quickly on the heels of absorbing Crimea after a referendum there.

And some European Union members have threatened to boycott the summit should President Putin be there. Likely these calls for boycott among Western capitals will only grow now that host country Indonesia has made its intentions clear.

In a seeming effort to preempt the severe criticism that’s already arisen, President Widodo said, “Indonesia wants to unite the G-20. Don’t let there be division.” Indirectly referencing the war in Ukraine, he added: “Peace and stability are the keys to the global economy’s recovery and development.”

Earlier in the year Russia’s ambassador to Indonesia signaled that, yes, President Putin would attend in person, but it remains unclear if the ongoing military invasion of Ukraine might have hindered these prior plans. 

#Ukraine President Zelensky#Russia President Putin

Both have been Invited to the G-20 Summit to be held at #Indonesia

Can the Asian Obama
President Joko Widodo do something about acheiving peace in Europe ? #UkraineRussiaWar pic.twitter.com/Si5TF1wKsX

— BharatPatriot 🇩🇪🇺🇸🇺🇦🇨🇵🇮🇱🇪🇺 (@BharatPatriot1) April 29, 2022

Of note concerning the possible seriously awkward spectacle of both Putin and Zelensky’s personal attendance among other world leaders at the major global economic summit is that while the US and Russia are G-20 members, obviously Ukraine is not a member.

Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,

Appearing on Fox News Thursday, Senator Rand Paul again vowed to subpoena Anthony Fauci and force him to answer questions he has repeatedly dodged, urging that Fauci is “against freedoms”.

Speaking to Send Hannity, Paul declared that “Fauci’s sort of nonsense over whether the pandemics ended or not – when you see him come out and he basically has said that the court shouldn’t be involved with limiting his power. What he is saying basically is that he’s against individual choice, he’s against American freedoms to choose their own medicine, to choose their treatment.”

“So this is a man that is against everything that America stands for,” the Senator asserted.

Paul was referring to Fauci recently saying that his own opinions and those of the CDC should be above the authority of the courts when it comes to health policy.

Paul continued, “He thinks that his edict should stand. No court or Constitution should review his edicts, and no individual person should get the choice to make it.”

Paul noted however, that “if you look at the airport, I was in the airport this week, everybody is all smiles and 97% of the people at least, are not wearing a mask because they have made the judgment that they are not at risk for COVID.”

Elsewhere during the interview, Paul lambasted the double standards of Vice President Kamala Harris for getting antiviral treatment for COVID despite being quadruple vaccinated.

“I don’t think giving her a $300 treatment is a good idea,” Paul said, explaining that “Unless you’re incredibly high risk or you’re symptomatic, I don’t think treating everybody before they get any symptoms is a good idea.

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Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called a businessman sentence to life in prison for organizing the 2013 anti-government Gezi Park protests the “George Soros” of Turkey.

“This man was Turkey’s Soros, and this man was the behind-the-scenes coordinator of the Gezi events, and our judiciary made its final decision on him,” Erdogan said of Osman Kavala, who was sentenced to life in prison earlier this week.

Kavala sat on the board of the Turkish chapter of Soros’s Open Society Foundation until the Turkish government shuttered it in 2018.

A criminal court in Istanbul convicted Kavala this week of conspiring to overthrow Erdogan in a failed 2016 coup, and allegedly financing and organizing the Gezi Park protests.

Monday’s verdict was criticized by rights groups and Turkey’s western allies as an attempt to silence opponents under Erdogan’s increasingly authoritarian rule. The U.S. said it was “deeply troubled and disappointed” by the court’s decision and reiterated calls for Kavala’s release in line with European Court of Human Rights rulings. –Bloomberg

“There is law in this country, there is a judiciary in this country, and this judiciary has made its decision,” Erdogan told representatives of several NGOs during a fast-breaking dinner in Istanbul.

In addition to Kavala, seven other activists were sentenced to as long as 18 years in prison for their role in conspiring to over throw the government – charges they all deny.

The sentences drew protests in Istanbul earlier this week, with hundreds coming out to protest Kavala and the others’ sentences.

The US State Department has defended the guilty parties – saying in a statement: “The people of Turkey deserve to exercise their human rights and fundamental freedoms without fear of retribution,” adding “We urge the government to cease politically motivated prosecutions and to respect the rights and freedoms of all Turkish citizens.”

Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

The US government today likes to pretend that it is the perennial champion of political independence for countries that were once behind the Iron Curtain. What is often forgotten, however, is that in the days following the fall of the Berlin Wall, Washington opposed independence for Soviet republics like Ukraine and the Baltic states.

In fact, the Bush administration openly supported Mikhail Gorbachev’s efforts to hold the Soviet Union together rather than allow the USSR to decentralize into smaller states. The US regime and its supporters in the press took the position that nationalism—not Soviet despotism—was the real problem for the people of Eastern Europe and the Caucasus.

Indeed, in the case of Ukraine, President George H.W. Bush even traveled to Kyiv in 1990 to lecture the Ukrainians about the dangers of seeking independence from Moscow, while decrying the supposed nationalist threat.

Today, nationalism is still a favorite bogeyman among Washington establishment mouthpieces. These outlets routinely opine on the dangers of French nationalism, Hungarian nationalism, and Russian nationalism. One often sees the term nationalism applied in ways designed to make the term distasteful, as in “white nationalism.”

When nationalism is convenient for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and its European freeloaders, on the other hand, we are told that nationalism is a force for good. Thus, the US regime and mainstream media generally pretend that Ukrainian nationalism—and even Ukrainian white nationalism—either don’t exist or are to be praised.

In 1991, however, the US had not yet decided that it paid to actively promote nationalism—so long as it is anti-Russian nationalism. Thus, in those days, we find the US regime siding with Moscow in efforts to stifle or discourage local nationalist efforts to break with the old Soviet state. The way it played out is an interesting case study in both Bush administration bumbling and in the US’s foreign policy before the advent of unipolar American liberal hegemony. 

The Antinationalist Context

In the late 1980s, it was already apparent that the Soviet Union was beginning to lose its grip on many parts of the enormous polity that was the USSR. Restive nationalists within the Soviet Union were beginning to assert local control. For example, by 1989, ethnic Armenians and Azeris were already embroiled in the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh that continues to this day. Deadly ethnic violence flared, but Moscow, in its weakened state, put off taking action. Yet, in January 1990, Moscow did act in what is known in Azerbaijan today as “Black January.” Soviet tanks rolled into the Caspian Sea port city of Baku and killed as many as 150 Azeris—many of them civilians: “The ostensible aim of the intervention was to stop Azeri massacres of Armenians, but the real goal was to prevent the Azerbaijani Popular Front from taking power.”1 The Popular Front was the chief political arm of anti-Moscow nationalism in Azerbaijan, and its leader stated, ”The goal is to drive out the army, liquidate the [Moscow-controlled] Azerbaijani Communist Party, establish a democratic parliament.”

Yet instead of Washington pundits instructing Americans to announce “I stand with Azerbaijan,” we were told the real threat was nationalism. As Doyle McManus wrote at the Los Angeles Times in 1990: “An ancient specter is haunting Europe: untamed nationalism…. From Baku to Berlin, as the Soviet Bloc has disintegrated, ethnic conflicts that once seemed part of the past have suddenly returned to life.” These old nationalistic impulses, one official from the State Department averred, are “dangerous ghosts” from Europe’s past. Arch establishment foreign policy advisor Zbigniew Brzezinki was on hand to claim that ethnic tensions could lead to “geopolitical anarchy.” Bush administration officials were “worried” that smaller national groups might replace the Soviet Union. At the time, it was not uncommon to hear that nationalism in Europe would bring about a situation similar to that which supposedly caused World War I. As one “senior Bush advisor” said, “It’s 1914 all over again.”

So, when the Soviet tanks showed up to crush a potential coup that might free some Soviet subjects from Moscow’s yoke, the feeling in Washington was one of relief rather than dismay at Moscow’s aggression. Washington was clinging to the idea that the answer to nationalism was to ensure the continued existence of—as Murray Rothbard put it—”a single, overriding government agency with a monopoly force to settle disputes by coercion.” That agency was the USSR. 

The US Against Independence for Ukraine and the Baltics

That was in early 1990. By late 1990, on the other hand, it was increasingly apparent that the Soviet state was in deep trouble and events were spiraling beyond the control of either Moscow or Washington. The situation in the Baltics was especially acute. On March 30, 1990, Lithuania declared independence and seceded from the Soviet Union. The Soviet state responded with a blockade. Latvia and Estonia began moving toward independence as well, although these two countries would not formally secede until late August 1991.

Yet, even in early August 1991, Washington under George H.W. Bush was still obsessed with the nationalist “threat.” In early 1990, the Soviets had claimed that Baltic independence was “a threat to European stability,” and this position, according to the Los Angeles Times, had “won considerable sympathy within the Bush Administration and in West European capitals.” 

This preference for Moscow-coerced unity and “order” over nationalist decentralization was again on full display on August 1, 1991. This was when George Bush delivered his notorious “Chicken Kiev” speech. In this address to the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian USSR, Bush harangued the Ukrainians on the need to accept rule from Moscow and reject nationalism, stating

Yet freedom is not the same as independence. Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred.

In other words, the nationalist bogeyman was invoked to hold the Soviet Union together. Bush’s finger wagging at the secessionists was received well by “moderate” pro-Moscow communists. But it was less well received by Ukrainian nationalists—to put it mildly—and Baltic secessionists were horrified as well. But few were waiting for approval from the Americans. Less than six months later, all of the Baltics had seceded from the USSR, and a Ukrainian referendum on independence passed easily. (Lackluster support for secession continued in the Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine.)

In delivering this speech, Bush was essentially acting as Gorbachev’s message boy, and Bush clearly supported Gorbachev’s “All-Union Treaty,” which was supposed to create a new, enlightened version of the Soviet Union that would replace the old USSR.

Yet if the Soviet Union was going to hold together, it was going to require the participation of the Ukrainians. That didn’t happen, and Foreign Affairs concluded in 1992, “It was Ukraine, led by President Leonid Kravchuk, that ultimately provoked the unraveling of the Soviet empire: Ukraine’s refusal to sign Mikhail Gorbachev’s union treaty precipitated the collapse of the U.S.S.R.”

Through most of it, the US had repeatedly warned against the dangers of secession and the threat of nationalism. Instead, the party line in Washington appeared to be that the old Soviet Union could be reformed into a new large state where democracy would keep the Lithuanians, the Ukrainians, the Azeris, the Armenians, and countless others in line. After all, from the point of view of Washington, the end of large state is not a rebirth of freedom, but an outbreak of “chaos” and “instability.” Thus, Moscow was treated as a far greater friend of Washington than secessionists in Kiev or Riga.

The panic over nationalism in the former USSR didn’t persist, however. Washington’s about-face on all this came when Washington realized it could extend its “unipolar moment” by expanding NATO—in spite of the promise to not extend NATO eastward. Once it became clear that nationalism could be harnessed to serve the ends of NATO expansionists, then nationalism became a feature of “sovereignty” and the “rules-based order.” But as we’ve seen with the badmouthing of Polish and Hungarian efforts to control their borders and assert independence from Brussels, nationalism is intolerable whenever it inconveniences the European Commission or the White House.

It looks as though Chief Executive Christian Sewing could actually be making an attempt to clean things up at Deutsche Bank, after years of regulatory issues at the bank. In fact, Deutsche Bank headquarters is reportedly being searched at this moment as part of an ongoing money laundering case that it appears the bank tipped off regulators to. 

The bank’s offices in Frankfurt are being searched by law enforcement authorities “after the lender flagged potential money laundering,” Bloomberg wrote on Friday morning.

The raid includes officials from the Frankfurt prosecutors office and Germany’s BKA federal police, the report continues. The searches are taking place following the decision by a Frankfurt court, the report says. 

Additionally, representatives of financial regulator BaFin were also involved in the search, Reuters reported. 

Deutsche Bank said in a statement that the search relates to “reports made by the bank of suspected money laundering” and the bank said it is “cooperation [sic] fully with authorities”. Reuters confirmed that the search was due to a tip from the bank, stating “the search involved suspicious transactions it had itself passed on to authorities”. 

“Police officers are present in and around Deutsche Bank’s Frankfurt headquarters”, Bloomberg confirmed Friday morning. However, one witness told Reuters “there was no sign of authorities outside the bank’s headquarters on Friday”.

Deutsche Bank made the following statement:

“This is an investigative measure by the Frankfurt public prosecutor’s office in connection with suspicious activity reports filed by the bank. Deutsche Bank is fully cooperating with the authorities.”

Meanwhile, Deutsche has been under the microscope for potential money laundering for years, facing nearly $700 million in fines for trades that authorities said were used to illegally launder money.