53percenter's Blog

On sheer volume, open-borders advocates are in the catbird seat, getting exactly the open borders they have effectively been calling for.

Here is the latest from NPR:

The number of migrants apprehended at the Southern border surpassed 100,000 for the second consecutive month, according to new figures released by the Trump administration.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection apprehended 109,144 migrants in April. That is more than 5,400 over the total in the month of March, and it is the highest monthly total since 2007.

The chief of the Border Patrol, Carla Provost, told a Senate Judiciary panel that “our apprehension numbers are off the charts.”

“We cannot address this crisis by shifting more resources. It’s like holding a bucket under a faucet. It doesn’t matter how many buckets you give me if we can’t turn off the flow,” she said.

For the rest of us, we are about to learn just what open borders looks like. 109,000 is quite a few people, not just in a big country such as the United States, but in the countries these migrants are coming from – 1% of the population of Guatemala, 1% of the population of Honduras, taken over the course of the first seven months of the fiscal year.

Economist Hernando de Soto told me several years ago that history shows there is no stopping the movement of peoples, and while I felt disagreement with him then, it’s clear that in this mass migration incident, he was in a certain way right. It’s not that people are unstoppable like deer in nature, however. It’s that the incentivizing laws from the U.S. – from the failure of the asylum system to keep junk claims out, to the huge banquet of ‘free’ benefits on offer from states, which judges have ruled no popular vote can stop, pretty well inevitably leads to the now-seen open border that lawmen can no longer stop, all based on sheer volume. The law has little ballast or enforcement in the face of a migrant flood, with migrants now rolling in not just form Central America, but from all over the world.

What is it going to take to reestablish rule of law, to stop so many service-desperate, uneducated, hard-to-assimilate, unskilled migrants looking for a handout without following the law? It helps of course when someone puts pressure on the governments that make life so miserable for their citizens that they want to leave, as a Nigerian cardinal did recently, blasting his country’s government for driving so many people out based on their rotten governance. In this hemisphere, no such leadership is evident on the ground in remittance-hungry countries such as Honduras, so the migrants are coming.

Sadly, Victor Davis Hanson has offered the grim answer where the limit lies from these current open-border dynamics, too, writing: 

Under such conditions, the logical limits of immigration can be calibrated not so much by whether countries south of the border reach parity with American standards of living, freedom, security, and quality of life. But rather the current issue is whether regions of America, especially the American Southwest become roughly indistinguishable from Latin America and Mexico, and therefore in terms of economic opportunity, safety, and quality of life do not offer that much of an improvement—or at least not such a radical margin of enhancement to justify abandoning one’s homeland.

In such an equation, the more that illegal aliens arrive, swamp social services and tax law enforcement, the more that they create ethnic enclaves that resist rapid assimilation and the more that they sense that their hosts see them most useful as an identity politics constituency, then the more parts of the southwestern United States will seem more like Mexico, and perhaps to the point of eventually diminishing illegal immigration.

No one knows what the saturation point might be of illegal and unassimilated immigration, but influxes are now approximating each month a mid-sized American city. 

So the U.S. will have to become as corrupt, hellish and impoverished as the places these foreigners leave behind to nullify the enticements of migrating illegally. 

Which is a pretty sad picture. The only possibility of reversing it, though, is still out there, given that nations such as Canada and Australia have mastered it: they crafted far better immigration laws, which required fewer lawmen to stop those who would break those laws. If the U.S. does this, the nation can renew its commitment to rule of law and serious efforts can be made to halt illegal entrants at the border.

No chance for that with the Democrats, who see the migrants as politically useful in a lot of ways, the needier and more easily manipulated, the better.

So for now, the migrants are rolling in, and the Border Patrol, with no tools for stopping anyone (just deporting one of them require the use of a detention bed they don’t have) is effectively just waving them though, if not serving as free babysitters for people who should be paying for their own freight the way normal people do.

It’s sad because the other thing Hernando de Soto said was critical for any prosperity and stability in a country is the invisible architecture of rule of law. Without it, the U.S. can just morph into Honduras North. It appears the Democrats would have that because they are blocking any meaningful efforts to control the border, the borders are wide open now and rule of law is going fast.

Image credit: ABC News, via shareable YouTube, screen shot

On sheer volume, open-borders advocates are in the catbird seat, getting exactly the open borders they have effectively been calling for.

Here is the latest from NPR:

The number of migrants apprehended at the Southern border surpassed 100,000 for the second consecutive month, according to new figures released by the Trump administration.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection apprehended 109,144 migrants in April. That is more than 5,400 over the total in the month of March, and it is the highest monthly total since 2007.

The chief of the Border Patrol, Carla Provost, told a Senate Judiciary panel that “our apprehension numbers are off the charts.”

“We cannot address this crisis by shifting more resources. It’s like holding a bucket under a faucet. It doesn’t matter how many buckets you give me if we can’t turn off the flow,” she said.

For the rest of us, we are about to learn just what open borders looks like. 109,000 is quite a few people, not just in a big country such as the United States, but in the countries these migrants are coming from – 1% of the population of Guatemala, 1% of the population of Honduras, taken over the course of the first seven months of the fiscal year.

Economist Hernando de Soto told me several years ago that history shows there is no stopping the movement of peoples, and while I felt disagreement with him then, it’s clear that in this mass migration incident, he was in a certain way right. It’s not that people are unstoppable like deer in nature, however. It’s that the incentivizing laws from the U.S. – from the failure of the asylum system to keep junk claims out, to the huge banquet of ‘free’ benefits on offer from states, which judges have ruled no popular vote can stop, pretty well inevitably leads to the now-seen open border that lawmen can no longer stop, all based on sheer volume. The law has little ballast or enforcement in the face of a migrant flood, with migrants now rolling in not just form Central America, but from all over the world.

What is it going to take to reestablish rule of law, to stop so many service-desperate, uneducated, hard-to-assimilate, unskilled migrants looking for a handout without following the law? It helps of course when someone puts pressure on the governments that make life so miserable for their citizens that they want to leave, as a Nigerian cardinal did recently, blasting his country’s government for driving so many people out based on their rotten governance. In this hemisphere, no such leadership is evident on the ground in remittance-hungry countries such as Honduras, so the migrants are coming.

Sadly, Victor Davis Hanson has offered the grim answer where the limit lies from these current open-border dynamics, too, writing: 

Under such conditions, the logical limits of immigration can be calibrated not so much by whether countries south of the border reach parity with American standards of living, freedom, security, and quality of life. But rather the current issue is whether regions of America, especially the American Southwest become roughly indistinguishable from Latin America and Mexico, and therefore in terms of economic opportunity, safety, and quality of life do not offer that much of an improvement—or at least not such a radical margin of enhancement to justify abandoning one’s homeland.

In such an equation, the more that illegal aliens arrive, swamp social services and tax law enforcement, the more that they create ethnic enclaves that resist rapid assimilation and the more that they sense that their hosts see them most useful as an identity politics constituency, then the more parts of the southwestern United States will seem more like Mexico, and perhaps to the point of eventually diminishing illegal immigration.

No one knows what the saturation point might be of illegal and unassimilated immigration, but influxes are now approximating each month a mid-sized American city. 

So the U.S. will have to become as corrupt, hellish and impoverished as the places these foreigners leave behind to nullify the enticements of migrating illegally. 

Which is a pretty sad picture. The only possibility of reversing it, though, is still out there, given that nations such as Canada and Australia have mastered it: they crafted far better immigration laws, which required fewer lawmen to stop those who would break those laws. If the U.S. does this, the nation can renew its commitment to rule of law and serious efforts can be made to halt illegal entrants at the border.

No chance for that with the Democrats, who see the migrants as politically useful in a lot of ways, the needier and more easily manipulated, the better.

So for now, the migrants are rolling in, and the Border Patrol, with no tools for stopping anyone (just deporting one of them require the use of a detention bed they don’t have) is effectively just waving them though, if not serving as free babysitters for people who should be paying for their own freight the way normal people do.

It’s sad because the other thing Hernando de Soto said was critical for any prosperity and stability in a country is the invisible architecture of rule of law. Without it, the U.S. can just morph into Honduras North. It appears the Democrats would have that because they are blocking any meaningful efforts to control the border, the borders are wide open now and rule of law is going fast.

Image credit: ABC News, via shareable YouTube, screen shot

What’s the connection between spicy chicken nuggets, tomato-farming labor organizing and virtue-signaling celebrities? A whole lot of social media posts and not a single bit of change.

I’m not a huge Wendy’s guy, so I can’t vouch for the deliciousness of the aforementioned spicy chicken nuggets. However, the chain made a promise that it would bring back the menu item if the tweet got 2 million Twitter likes, after hip-hop star Chance the Rapper made hopes for the nuggets’ return a daily affirmation. (I like Chance, but I don’t get it, either.)

Y’all keep asking, so here’s your chance.The people in charge say if you guys can get our tweet (this one right here) to 2 Million likes, they will bring SPICY CHICKEN NUGGETS BACK.Let’s freakin’ do this! https://t.co/qrtvWXjj9V

— Wendy’s (@Wendys) May 4, 2019

And lo and behold:

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THIS IS NOT A DRILL!Spicy Chicken Nuggets are coming back! Y’all are crazy!That took like a day and a half! WHAT?!We don’t know when yet, gotta figure it out, but soon, and ok, LOSING IT RIGHT NOW THIS IS AMAZING!!

— Wendy’s (@Wendys) May 6, 2019

So, you have your spicy chicken nuggets. And Amy Schumer and Alyssa Milano have a beef (pun intended, I suppose) with Wendy’s.

“Hey! We love @chancetherapper and hate to be the ones to tell him that Wendys is the only fast food chain refusing to protect farmworker women from sexual assault and rape in the fields,” Schumer wrote. “This is true. Please read that sentence again. Message for the people in charge: Instead of spicy nuggets, we want food that is harvested with dignity NOT violence. Please join the @fairfoodprogram and #BoycottWendys link in my bio of how you can help.”

So, here’s the controversy, which has nothing to do with nuggets and everything to do with tomatoes: Wendy’s hasn’t signed onto what’s known as the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ Fair Food Program, which The New York Times describes as “currently benefit[ing] about 35,000 laborers, primarily in Florida. Over the last decade, it has helped transform the state’s tomato industry from one in which wage theft and violence were rampant to an industry with some of the highest labor standards in American agriculture.”

Wendy’s hasn’t signed onto the plan as other chains like Burger King and McDonald’s have. That doesn’t mean, however, it’s “refusing to protect farmworker women from sexual assault and rape in the fields.”

“Heidi Schauer, a Wendy’s spokeswoman, said in an email that the company required its tomato suppliers to submit to third-party reviews of their human rights and labor practices. She said the chain had recently committed to buying all of its tomatoes from indoor greenhouse farms, most of them in the United States and Canada, which ‘strengthens our commitment to treat people with respect,’” The Times reported.

Wendy’s also has a list of expectations for its suppliers that provides explicit protections against exploitation.

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“Suppliers are expected to provide a safe and healthy workplace in compliance with applicable local, state /provincial and federal laws and regulations,” one point reads. “Suppliers of certain fresh agricultural products harvested by hand or in an otherwise manually intensive way will be subject to third party human rights and labor practices reviews,” reads another. Other points include enforcement of labor norms, the ability to organize under a union and protections against harassment and discrimination.

Part of the issue, too, is the fact that the Fair Food Program covers field workers, not workers in hydroponic greenhouses — from where Wendy’s sources its tomatoes.

“This is a complex issue, but be assured that we do not purchase the field grown product that the Fair Food Program covers. In fact, Wendy’s is proud to only purchase tomatoes from indoor hydroponic North American farms,” a statement from Wendy’s read, according to Fox Business.

“We are excited about the superior quality of these tomatoes, and this move further strengthens our commitment to responsible sourcing practices by providing safe, indoor working conditions, shelter from the elements and environmental contaminants, reduced water and land use burdens, and a significantly reduced need for chemical pesticides.”

The Times wasn’t buying this: “Several experts questioned the value of such reviews, which are often superficial, as well as the suggestion that greenhouse farms provide more humane work environments.”

Their evidence for this is a letter sent to the Ohio State University student newspaper written by a Fordham University law professor whose been a vocal advocate for the Fair Food Program. You may be able to describe him as an “expert” on the issue, but a better word may have been “activist.”

While I’m sure there are more critics of these reviews, this wasn’t an independent labor law professor evaluating Wendy’s statement and expectations of their suppliers and concluding that they’ve been conducting only desultory oversight from their suppliers, it’s a partisan advocate who wants to pressure Wendy’s to sign onto the agreement.

Unsurprisingly, however, there were other Hollywood celebs wiling to use the spicy chicken nuggets to bludgeon Wendy’s. Unsurprisingly, one of them was Alyssa Milano.

Alyssa Milano, labor expert.

You may have noticed what’s missing: Any accusations that Wendy’s knowingly uses suppliers that abuse their workers or that allow sexual assaults to occur. Not one accusation. Not one incident critics can pinpoint.

This has little to do with exploitation and everything to do with agitating for a specific labor program. It’s difficult to call these outright lies, but they’re certainly misleading.

And, for celebrities, it’s about virtue signaling. This is the cheapest form of publicity one can get: Moral indignation. About what? What have you got?

In short, it’s all talking points with little substance attached. Enjoy those nuggets, folks.

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