53percenter's Blog

He Jiankui, the Chinese scientist who claimed recently to have successfully edited the genes of twin infants to reject HIV, appears to have gone missing since delivering remarks at a Hong Kong scientific conference, the South China Morning Post reported on Monday.

He reportedly embarked on his experiment without the express permission of the Chinese Communist Party. He published videos on YouTube in late November introducing “Lulu” and “Nana,” two twin girls who he claimed were genetically edited to rejected HIV, the virus responsible for AIDS. Scientists around the world have deemed the CRISPR technology used in the experience highly risky, as there are little safeguards ensuring that only the gene targeted is edited, and no research confirming that such editing only adds or eliminates what the scientist wishes. If confirmed to have occurred, He’s experiment would be the first of its kind on human beings.

The Post notes that He’s whereabouts are currently “unknown,” though the Chinese government has not claimed to have arrested him. Beijing has a long record of “disappearing” individuals it deems to defy or inherently pose a threat to the communist regime, from local priests spreading the Gospel to nationally acclaimed movie stars. The newspaper reached out to He’s academic institution, Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTC) in Shenzhen, but did not receive any concrete information on the scientist’s whereabouts or freedom status.

“We cannot answer any questions regarding the matter right now, but if we have any information, we will update it through our official channels,” a spokesperson for the university told the newspaper.

The Post reports that it chose to reach out to the university after unnamed “media outlets” claimed that He was under house arrest after speaking at an event in Hong Kong last week. At that event, the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing, He argued that “a natural protection against HIV is carried by as much as ten percent of the population in several European countries,” and his work had found a way to tinker with human genes to make them create this protection without having naturally come upon it. The scientist also insisted that the parents of the children were informed of the experimental nature of what he did to their daughters and consented.

The summit’s organizers issued a statement after hosting He declaring their belief that “proceeding with any clinical use of germline editing remains irresponsible at this time,” but that “making changes in the DNA of embryos or gametes could allow parents who carry disease-causing mutations to have healthy, genetically related children” and is worthy of the establishment of “rigorous, responsible” guidelines for how scientists should approach the study.

The statement called He’s claim “deeply disturbing” and urged “an independent assessment to verify this claim and to ascertain whether the claimed DNA modifications have occurred.”

While the international scientific community has condemned He for, if his claims are true, taking extreme risks with human lives, the Chinese government has condemned their lack of involvement or consent in the study. He Jiankui was once regaled in Chinese state propaganda for his research on genetics. An article in the People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of China, applauded He in July 2017 for leading research into advancing genome sequencing abilities through a project called GenoCare, described as “a new class of third-generation sequencing platform.”

The tenor of the People’s Daily article was notably missing from Chinese state media’s coverage of He’s latest work.

“There is no knowing why He did his experiment. It would be to his shame if he did it simply to gain fame,” China Daily mused last week in an editorial. “The truth behind the announcement that suggests such an experiment was conducted without approval needs to be clarified and any loopholes in the management of such sensitive scientific research must be closed.”

The Global Times, another state outlet, also demanded the creation of a federal scientific research oversight committee to micromanage university work, claiming that He took advantage of the decentralized regulation in academia to not attract government suspicion. It remains unclear whether He cleared the experiment with the proper channels; as the Global Times notes, He “claimed that his ‘research has been submitted to ethics committee [sic] for supervision,’ but he didn’t clarify which ethics committee.”

“If we don’t deal with He’s case seriously, the reputation of Chinese scientists will be totally ruined,” Huang Jiefu, China’s vice minister of health, told the Times, reportedly adding that “China’s science and technology have now developed far beyond the scope of the regulation that was established 15 years ago.”

The Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology has vowed a thorough probe into the matter of who, if anyone, approved the research, and how to create a national oversight infrastructure to ensure that scientists cannot conduct research that the Communist Party does not approve. The government also banned all research related to gene editing.

If the Chinese government confirms He’s apprehension, he will join a long list of high-profile Chinese citizens arbitrarily detained and “disappeared” without clarity. At the top of that list is Meng Hongwei, the rightful president of Interpol, who traveled to his native China to visit family and never returned. Chinese authorities abruptly issued a statement saying he was under arrest for unspecified corruption charges and sent Interpol what they claimed to be a letter from Meng resigning from his position at the head of the international agency.

China also “disappeared” one of the nation’s most famous actresses, Fan Bingbing, this year, for months. Police explained her disappearance in October, after five months of Fan’s social media going silent and the actress not appearing in public, claiming she had been convicted of tax fraud.

Follow Frances Martel on Facebook and Twitter.

And even the regular leftists behind the migrants are upset with their inciting.

Via Daily Caller:

A Detroit-based faction operating in Tijuana that’s encouraging the migrant caravan to march to the U.S. border has a history of violence and has been disavowed by Communist and progressive organizations.

BAMN, a Detroit-based group whose motto is “Trump must go or be removed BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY,” is inciting the migrants to march to the border. Its flier, titled “Open It Up Or We’ll Shut It Down! Everyone Must Be Let In!” was distributed to the migrants and its banner hung in the Benito Juarez sports complex that housed the caravan.

The faction, originally dedicated to affirmative action and affiliated with the Revolutionary Workers League, has been repeatedly condemned by groups it has crossed paths with, dating back two decades.

In 1995, the Socialist Party USA, Democratic Socialists of America, the Solidarity National Political Committee, and a long list of similar groups wrote: “As socialists, we condemn the actions of the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action By Any Means Necessary and the Revolutionary Workers League.”

Keep reading…

The FBI raided the whistleblower’s house and grabbed the docs he had on the Clintons, despite him saying he was represented and a whistleblower.

Via Daily Caller:

In the wake of a bombshell Daily Caller News Foundation investigative report late last week, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley demanded answers from FBI Director Christopher Wray about a Nov. 19 bureau raid on the home of a recognized whistleblower.

The whistleblower, Dennis Cain, who was once employed by an FBI contractor, reportedly turned over documents to the Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz regarding the bureau’s failure to investigate potential criminal activity regarding former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Clinton Foundation and the Russian company that purchased Uranium One.

Horowitz subsequently deemed Cain a whistleblower protected under the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act, Cain’s lawyer, Michael Socarras, told TheDCNF.

Grassley sent a letter to Wray on Nov. 30 asking pointed questions about the raid on Cain’s private residence in Union Bridge, Maryland.

Keep reading…

WASHINGTON, DC – More than 100 national conservative leaders demanded Tuesday that Congress tackle illegal aliens on the U.S.-Mexican border in the year-end funding measure, demanding $5 billion for a border wall and other national security safeguards.

Leaders of many of the most powerful conservative organizations in the United States signed this Conservative Action Project Memo to the Movement, entitled “America’s National Sovereignty Threatened: Congress Must Fund a Wall that Secures our Southern Border.”

“As the southern border continues to be overwhelmed by migrants seeking illegal entry into the United States, we urge Congress to finally address this issue,” begins the Memo to the Movement.

The Memo makes three specific demands on Congress to achieve this national security goal:

Provide a minimum of $5 billion for President Trump’s border wall. Unlike the $1.6 billion that Congress passed in March, these funds must allow the president to actually engage in new construction and planning. To be clear, funds that merely allow for repairs, planning or pedestrian fencing—and do not allow for new construction of President Trump’s wall prototypes—do not constitute funding a border wall.

Provide more funds for the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol. The U.S. border patrol is facing continued and growing illegal crossings, with more than 50,000 apprehensions this fiscal year alone. As current events have demonstrated, adequate funding for both manpower and resources are critical to the safety and security at the border, but also to our national sovereignty. Our legal immigration system, the rule of law, and the nature of U.S. citizenship are at risk if we do not control the flow of illegal immigration by securing the border.

Provide funds for more judges at the border. Under President Obama, the legal threshold for claiming asylum was lowered to one of “credible fear.” As a result, asylum cases have shot upward, many times taking years to process. In the meantime, illegal entrants claiming asylum are released into the interior of the country, where they await legal proceedings for which they may or may not show up. More judges at the border will allow for faster processing times, allowing genuine asylum claims to be identified and prioritized and inadequate asylum claims to be efficiently handled.

These leaders praise President Donald Trump, saying the commander-in-chief is “using all of his authorities to address this crisis at the border.”

The signatories include:

• Ed Meese, former U.S. Attorney General of the United States
• Don Hodel, former U.S. Secretary of Energy and Secretary of the Interior
• Matt Schlapp, Chairman, American Conservative Union
• Al Regnery, Chairman, Conservative Action Project
• Ken Blackwell, Chairman, Constitutional Congress
• Jenny Beth Martin, Chairman, Tea Party Patriots
• Tony Perkins, President, Family Research Council
• David Bozell, President, ForAmerica
• David Bossie, President, Citizens United
• Gary Bauer, President, American Principles Project
• Tom Fitton, President, Judicial Watch
• Bill Walton, Chairman, CNP Action
• Colin Hanna, President, Let Freedom Ring
• Charles Cooper, former Assistant Attorney General, U.S. Department of Justice
• Gen. Jerry Boykin (ret.), former Commander, U.S. Army Special Warfare Center
• Jim DeMint, former U.S. Senator
• Bob McEwen, former U.S. Congressman
• Ken Cribb, Former White House Domestic Policy Adviser to President Reagan

Ken Klukowski is senior legal editor for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @kenklukowski.

SEVERANCE, Colo. (AP) — A 9-year-old boy has convinced the leaders of a small northern Colorado town to overturn a nearly century-old ban on snowball fights, and he already knows who his first target will be — his little brother.

Dane Best, who lives in the often snow-swept town of Severance, presented his arguments at a town board meeting Monday night, and members voted unanimously to lift the ban.

“I think it’s an outdated law,” Dane said in the lead-up to the meeting. “I want to be able to throw a snowball without getting in trouble.”

Dane’s mother, Brooke Best, told The Greeley Tribune her son had been talking about snowballs since he found out about a month and a half ago that it was illegal to throw them within town limits. The last time it snowed, Dane said he and his friends looked around for police and joked about breaking the law.

Kyle Rietkerk, assistant to the Severance town administrator, said the rule was part of a larger ordinance that made it illegal to throw or shoot stones or missiles at people, animals, buildings, trees, any other public or private property or vehicles. Snowballs fell under the town’s definition of “missiles.”

“All of the kids always get blown away that it’s illegal to have snowball fights in Severance,” Rietkerk said before the meeting. “So, what ends up happening is (town leaders) always encourage the kids with, ‘You have the power you can change the law.’ No one has.”

Then Dane took up the cause, writing letters with his classmates in support of overturning the ban.

And after Monday night’s success, his 4-year-old brother Dax had better watch out. When board members asked Dane during a meeting in November who he wants to hit, he pointed directly at his little brother.

Dane and his family have researched other Severance ordinances, including one that defines pets only as cats and dogs.

Dane has a guinea pig, which is illegal in Severance, too.

TEL AVIV – Israel has mobilized artillery and unrolled a partial mobilization of reservists from the Air Force and Military Intelligence to thwart potential attacks from Lebanese terror group Hezbollah following the launch of an IDF operation to destroy cross-border attack tunnels dug by the Iranian-backed group.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who also serves as defense minister, held a meeting with security chiefs and senior defense officials Tuesday afternoon at IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv to discuss the operation, which has been dubbed Northern Shield.

IDF Spokesperson Brigadier General Ronen Manlis said the military was gearing itself up for an “extended operation.”

“We are prepared for all options, and the operation is only in its first day. The neutralizing of the tunnels will not necessarily take place within our territory,” he said.

The IDF said earlier that it had uncovered the “first of sure to be many” subterranean attack tunnels.

BREAKING: We have just launched Operation Northern Shield to expose and neutralize cross-border attack tunnels dug by Hezbollah from #Lebanon to #Israel. #NorthernShield pic.twitter.com/HKgnbhn23I

— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) December 4, 2018

The 200-meter tunnel, which originated in a private home in Qafr Kila in southern Lebanon and penetrated some 40 meters into Israel’s north near the town of Metulla, did not present an immediate threat, the army said.

The UN peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon, UNIFIL, was deployed today on both sides of the border to monitor developments and prevent escalation.

The IDF dismissed claims by both Israelis and Hezbollah that Netanyahu chose to launch Operation Northern Shield now because of calls by police to indict him.

“There’s no cynicism here,” Manelis said.

Speaking to Lebanon’s An-Nahar newspaper, an unnamed Hezbollah official compared Netanyahu to the fictional Don Quixote, who attacked imaginary enemies.

“He is in crisis mode. He is tilting at windmills in Lebanon in an attempt to evade it,” the Hezbollah official said.

However, IDF spokesperson Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus said the operation was planned over a year ago and the launch date was decided upon weeks before the police recommendations were published.

The attack tunnel took Hezbollah more than two years to excavate and contained electrical and communication lines as well as ventilation, the army said, adding that it was “intended to hurt civilians.”

“Hezbollah has been using industrial equipment in order to dig these tunnels. We are beginning to assess and analyze the findings,” Conricus said.

On Monday, Netanyahu told Secretary of State Mike Pompeo during a last-minute meeting in Brussels that Israel would take military action if Beirut did not reign in Hezbollah.

The prime minister told Pompeo that the tunnels were “a flagrant violation of Israeli sovereignty and UN Security Council Resolution 1701,” according to a statement provided by his office.

Netanyahu added that the operation on the northern border was “complex,” but that it had so far been successful.

“We are taking determined and responsible action in all sectors simultaneously. We will continue with additional actions — open and covert — in order to ensure the security of Israel,” the prime minister said.

A study from the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) shows that the United States ranks 64th in the per capita frequency on the list of countries that witnessed mass shootings from 1998 to 2015.

The study also found that while the U.S. constitutes 4.6 percent of the world’s population, “it makes up less than 1.15 percent of the mass public shooters” and less than 1.5 percent of their murders.

CPRC used the study’s summary to explain: “Over the 18 years from 1998 to 2015, our list contains 2,354 attacks and at least 4,880 shooters outside the United States and 53 attacks and 57 shooters within our country. … Attacks in the US are not only less frequent than other countries, they are also much less deadly on average.”

It added, “Out of the 97 countries where we have identified mass public shootings occurring, the United States ranks 64th in the per capita frequency of these attacks and 65th in the murder rate.”

CPRC also notes that attacks in the U.S. are on the decline, that “there has been a much bigger increase over time in the number and severity of mass shootings in the rest of the world compared to the US.”

The CPRC’s findings on the number of mass shootings in America run completely counter to the mantra of the establishment media, Hollywood elites, and various gun control activists, but they are in line with academic research that seeks to present an unpoliticized view of the world.

For example, in June, the New York Times claimed “at least 700 mass shootings” over a two-year time frame, and in 2015, actress Rose McGowan claimed 355 in 2015 alone. But a University of Alabama researcher found a much lower figure–a total of 90 mass shootings in America from 1966-2012.

With emotionalism out and academic rigor in, CPRC shows 53 mass attacks in the U.S. during the last 18 years and declining U.S. share in the number of attacks worldwide.

AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News, the host of the Breitbart podcast Bullets with AWR Hawkins, and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. Sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.

The campaign of the American left to silence conservatives on campus sustained a massive defeat yesterday, as the University of California, Berkeley reached a legal settlement (text here) to a lawsuit brought against it following cancelation of a speech by Ann Coulter.  The co-sponsor of that speech (along with Berkeley College Republicans), Young America’s Foundation (YAF) jubilantly announced, in an article by Spencer Brown:

Following more than a year of hard-fought litigation in the hostile Ninth Circuit, Young America’s Foundation secured victory for free speech against the University of California, Berkeley.  Through YAF’s lawsuit and subsequent settlement agreement executed over the weekend, UC Berkeley agreed to the following terms set by Young America’s Foundation:

1) Pay Young America’s Foundation $70,000.

2) Rescind the unconstitutional “high-profile speaker policy.”

3) Rescind the viewpoint-discriminatory security fee policy.

4) Abolish its heckler’s veto – protestors will no longer be able to shut down conservative expression. 

This landmark victory for free expression means UC Berkeley can no longer wantonly treat conservative students as second-class members of its community while ignoring the guaranteed protections of the First Amendment. 

No longer can UC Berkeley place a 3:00 p.m. curfew on conservative speech.  No longer can UC Berkeley ban advertisements for Young America’s Foundation-sponsored campus lectures.  And no longer can UC Berkeley relegate conservative speakers to remote or inconvenient lecture halls on campus while giving leftist speakers access to preferred locations. 

Further, the policy that allowed Berkeley administrators to charge conservative students $20,000 for security to host Ben Shapiro – an amount three times greater than the fee charged to leftist students to host liberal Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor – is gone.  YAF and UC Berkeley agreed to a fee schedule that treats all students equally.  Unless students are handling money or serving alcohol at an event, the security fee will be zero.

Sather Gate, University of California, Berkeley (photo credit: Picryl).  Sproul Paza, beyond the gate, has been the scene of many riots since 1964, including the one that shut down Milo Yiannopoulos’s speech.

The lawsuit was handled by the Dhillon Law Group, founded by superstar civil rights lawyer Harmeet Dhillon, who also represents James Damore, the Google engineer fired for posting a memo questioning progressive orthodoxy on sex.  She issued a press release stating:

This landmark settlement means that all students at UC Berkeley now have the exciting opportunity to hear a variety of viewpoints on campus without the artificial tax of security fees selectively imposed on disfavored speech[.]

As is customary in such settlements, U.C. Berkeley and the other named defendants deny the allegations while agreeing to change policies and pay up $70,000, which presumably will be applied to the plaintiffs’ legal fees.

The Daily Californian student newspaper features the statement of the University:

“Given that this outcome is all but indistinguishable from what a courtroom victory would have looked like, we see this as the least expensive path to successful resolution of this lawsuit,” Mogulof said in the statement.  ”While we regret the time, effort and resources that have been expended successfully defending the constitutionality of UC Berkeley’s event policy, this settlement means the campus will not need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in unrecoverable defense costs to prove that UC Berkeley has never discriminated on the basis of viewpoint.”

There is huge irony in this case in that in 1954, the University of California, Berkeley was convulsed with student demonstrations in the so-called Free Speech Movement that kicked off years of student unrest.  At that time, the left demanded free speech, only to reverse itself half a century later following its hegemony on campuses and demand the silencing of dissident voices questioning its shibboleths.  With elite academia captured by the left, universities have largely betrayed their mission of open inquiry and sided with the silencers.

This settlement represents a reversal of course – at least at the campus that has played the leading role in the left’s assault on civil rights.

The campaign of the American left to silence conservatives on campus sustained a massive defeat yesterday, as the University of California, Berkeley reached a legal settlement (text here) to a lawsuit brought against it following cancelation of a speech by Ann Coulter.  The co-sponsor of that speech (along with Berkeley College Republicans), Young America’s Foundation (YAF) jubilantly announced, in an article by Spencer Brown:

Following more than a year of hard-fought litigation in the hostile Ninth Circuit, Young America’s Foundation secured victory for free speech against the University of California, Berkeley.  Through YAF’s lawsuit and subsequent settlement agreement executed over the weekend, UC Berkeley agreed to the following terms set by Young America’s Foundation:

1) Pay Young America’s Foundation $70,000.

2) Rescind the unconstitutional “high-profile speaker policy.”

3) Rescind the viewpoint-discriminatory security fee policy.

4) Abolish its heckler’s veto – protestors will no longer be able to shut down conservative expression. 

This landmark victory for free expression means UC Berkeley can no longer wantonly treat conservative students as second-class members of its community while ignoring the guaranteed protections of the First Amendment. 

No longer can UC Berkeley place a 3:00 p.m. curfew on conservative speech.  No longer can UC Berkeley ban advertisements for Young America’s Foundation-sponsored campus lectures.  And no longer can UC Berkeley relegate conservative speakers to remote or inconvenient lecture halls on campus while giving leftist speakers access to preferred locations. 

Further, the policy that allowed Berkeley administrators to charge conservative students $20,000 for security to host Ben Shapiro – an amount three times greater than the fee charged to leftist students to host liberal Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor – is gone.  YAF and UC Berkeley agreed to a fee schedule that treats all students equally.  Unless students are handling money or serving alcohol at an event, the security fee will be zero.

Sather Gate, University of California, Berkeley (photo credit: Picryl).  Sproul Paza, beyond the gate, has been the scene of many riots since 1964, including the one that shut down Milo Yiannopoulos’s speech.

The lawsuit was handled by the Dhillon Law Group, founded by superstar civil rights lawyer Harmeet Dhillon, who also represents James Damore, the Google engineer fired for posting a memo questioning progressive orthodoxy on sex.  She issued a press release stating:

This landmark settlement means that all students at UC Berkeley now have the exciting opportunity to hear a variety of viewpoints on campus without the artificial tax of security fees selectively imposed on disfavored speech[.]

As is customary in such settlements, U.C. Berkeley and the other named defendants deny the allegations while agreeing to change policies and pay up $70,000, which presumably will be applied to the plaintiffs’ legal fees.

The Daily Californian student newspaper features the statement of the University:

“Given that this outcome is all but indistinguishable from what a courtroom victory would have looked like, we see this as the least expensive path to successful resolution of this lawsuit,” Mogulof said in the statement.  ”While we regret the time, effort and resources that have been expended successfully defending the constitutionality of UC Berkeley’s event policy, this settlement means the campus will not need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in unrecoverable defense costs to prove that UC Berkeley has never discriminated on the basis of viewpoint.”

There is huge irony in this case in that in 1954, the University of California, Berkeley was convulsed with student demonstrations in the so-called Free Speech Movement that kicked off years of student unrest.  At that time, the left demanded free speech, only to reverse itself half a century later following its hegemony on campuses and demand the silencing of dissident voices questioning its shibboleths.  With elite academia captured by the left, universities have largely betrayed their mission of open inquiry and sided with the silencers.

This settlement represents a reversal of course – at least at the campus that has played the leading role in the left’s assault on civil rights.

Anyone who thinks illegal aliens and “asylum” applicants are coming here to work is living on another planet.

New data from the Census show that 63% of non-citizens are helping themselves to the welfare.  They get it legally, and sometimes illegally, through food programs, general assistance programs, Medicaid, and the earned income tax credit for low-income workers, just for starters.  They get even more when benefits derived from their U.S.-born children are thrown in, though bringing in a kid born elsewhere is also an asset.

Here’s the report from the Washington Examiner:

A majority of “non-citizens,” including those with legal green card rights, are tapping into welfare programs set up to help poor and ailing Americans, a Census Bureau finding that bolsters President Trump’s concern about immigrants costing the nation.

In a new analysis of the latest numbers, from 2014, 63 percent of non-citizens are using a welfare program, and it grows to 70 percent for those here 10 years or more, confirming another concern that once immigrants tap into welfare, they don’t get off it.

So no, it’s not a temporary little safety net for those who just arrive here until they get their sea legs on the vast ship of America – the percentage of non-citizens on welfare expands as such people stay a while, meaning welfare is preferable to work.  Why work when Uncle Sam is giving it away for free?  That’s a great deal for someone otherwise condemned to living in a tin shack out in Tegucigalpa but not a benefit to our country.  In fact, it’s a drain, and Democrats, based on their policy positions, seem desperate to import more of it.

It’s almost a given that the illegal alien population would be part of this trend.  The migrant caravan of Honduras consists almost exclusively of low-skilled, zero-English people who at best have a tenth-grade education.  As a result, they are likely to earn only low wages here and are least likely to assimilate, given their high concentrations.  The generous welfare state is making it easy for them, and drawing more to come.

Amazingly, even legal immigrants are higher consumers of welfare services, too.  That likely speaks to the power of leftist judges who take any asylum claim no matter how unlikely an applicant is to succeed here, as well as the power of family reunifications that expand the size of non-citizen welfare families as well as their consumption of welfare.  It’s very rare that an uneducated legal immigrant here is going to have a lot of educated relatives to bring in through chain migration.

Every detail of the report is problematic.  Most people probably wouldn’t mind if illegal aliens and other non-citizens really did come here to work and nothing else.  But even work is corrupted with the fact that illegals and other non-citizens qualify for the earned income tax credit, meaning that if they earn low wages, they get big fat tax refunds back despite not paying any taxes into the system.  That explains why nearly all non-citizen households have one member who works.  The tax credit, after all, is large.

This presumably doesn’t even get into other kinds of services illegals use that aren’t considered welfare, such as free public school education, public defenders, highway use, and untaxed remittances on illegally earned wages.

And the use of public assistance seems to be going up.  If you look at this interview done by Paul Sperry earlier this year from an immigration-skeptical think-tank, the official says 62% of non-citizens use welfare.  Now the Census data shows that it is 63%.  That signals word getting around south of our border.

Two things stand out.  One, Republicans have done nothing to cut off at least some of the benefits, such as the earned income tax credit, which is so obviously a magnet for non-contributory migrants who come here to take, without putting a penny into the system.  Where were these Republicans when they had some power to end this injustice?

Two, the Democrats are pushing for more of this kind of welfare migration, extending the goody table ever farther for them.  California, for instance, wants to put every low-waged illegal on Medi-Cal, offering up a free ride to all takers from abroad while the rest of us make rent-sized payments for our health insurance, and Democrats want to extend the vast banquet table of benefits ($12 billion’s worth) to DREAMers.  That speaks to a party desperate to import more poverty to secure votes.  That was how Hugo Chávez secured his votes – and his permanent power in Venezuela. 

Voters haven’t a clue as to how dangerous this all is.

Anyone who thinks illegal aliens and “asylum” applicants are coming here to work is living on another planet.

New data from the Census show that 63% of non-citizens are helping themselves to the welfare.  They get it legally, and sometimes illegally, through food programs, general assistance programs, Medicaid, and the earned income tax credit for low-income workers, just for starters.  They get even more when benefits derived from their U.S.-born children are thrown in, though bringing in a kid born elsewhere is also an asset.

Here’s the report from the Washington Examiner:

A majority of “non-citizens,” including those with legal green card rights, are tapping into welfare programs set up to help poor and ailing Americans, a Census Bureau finding that bolsters President Trump’s concern about immigrants costing the nation.

In a new analysis of the latest numbers, from 2014, 63 percent of non-citizens are using a welfare program, and it grows to 70 percent for those here 10 years or more, confirming another concern that once immigrants tap into welfare, they don’t get off it.

So no, it’s not a temporary little safety net for those who just arrive here until they get their sea legs on the vast ship of America – the percentage of non-citizens on welfare expands as such people stay a while, meaning welfare is preferable to work.  Why work when Uncle Sam is giving it away for free?  That’s a great deal for someone otherwise condemned to living in a tin shack out in Tegucigalpa but not a benefit to our country.  In fact, it’s a drain, and Democrats, based on their policy positions, seem desperate to import more of it.

It’s almost a given that the illegal alien population would be part of this trend.  The migrant caravan of Honduras consists almost exclusively of low-skilled, zero-English people who at best have a tenth-grade education.  As a result, they are likely to earn only low wages here and are least likely to assimilate, given their high concentrations.  The generous welfare state is making it easy for them, and drawing more to come.

Amazingly, even legal immigrants are higher consumers of welfare services, too.  That likely speaks to the power of leftist judges who take any asylum claim no matter how unlikely an applicant is to succeed here, as well as the power of family reunifications that expand the size of non-citizen welfare families as well as their consumption of welfare.  It’s very rare that an uneducated legal immigrant here is going to have a lot of educated relatives to bring in through chain migration.

Every detail of the report is problematic.  Most people probably wouldn’t mind if illegal aliens and other non-citizens really did come here to work and nothing else.  But even work is corrupted with the fact that illegals and other non-citizens qualify for the earned income tax credit, meaning that if they earn low wages, they get big fat tax refunds back despite not paying any taxes into the system.  That explains why nearly all non-citizen households have one member who works.  The tax credit, after all, is large.

This presumably doesn’t even get into other kinds of services illegals use that aren’t considered welfare, such as free public school education, public defenders, highway use, and untaxed remittances on illegally earned wages.

And the use of public assistance seems to be going up.  If you look at this interview done by Paul Sperry earlier this year from an immigration-skeptical think-tank, the official says 62% of non-citizens use welfare.  Now the Census data shows that it is 63%.  That signals word getting around south of our border.

Two things stand out.  One, Republicans have done nothing to cut off at least some of the benefits, such as the earned income tax credit, which is so obviously a magnet for non-contributory migrants who come here to take, without putting a penny into the system.  Where were these Republicans when they had some power to end this injustice?

Two, the Democrats are pushing for more of this kind of welfare migration, extending the goody table ever farther for them.  California, for instance, wants to put every low-waged illegal on Medi-Cal, offering up a free ride to all takers from abroad while the rest of us make rent-sized payments for our health insurance, and Democrats want to extend the vast banquet table of benefits ($12 billion’s worth) to DREAMers.  That speaks to a party desperate to import more poverty to secure votes.  That was how Hugo Chávez secured his votes – and his permanent power in Venezuela. 

Voters haven’t a clue as to how dangerous this all is.