The path to civilizational destruction should be very familiar by now
By--Victor Davis Hanson Fox News--Published April 5, 2024—printed off 4/8/24
The Biden administration is 'assaulting the very mechanisms and protocols we use to live': Victor Davis Hanson Why are those controlling President Biden using him to advance so much of a destructive agenda that it will likely end America as we know it? If someone wished to destroy America, could he do anything more catastrophic than what we currently see and hear each day? What would an existential enemy do that we have not already done to ourselves?

EX-OBAMA STAFFER RIPS BIDEN FOR BEING 'PRIVATELY' ANGRY AT ISRAEL, BUT NOT CHANGING POLICY: LOOKS 'WEAK'
Here are 11 now familiar steps to civilizational destruction:
1. Wipe out a 2,000-mile border.
Allow 10 million foreign nationals to enter unlawfully. Have no audit of any; nullify all federal i*********n l*ws. Let in toxic drugs that k**l 100,000 Americans a year. Give free support to those millions who broke the law. Smear any objectors as r****ts and xenophobes.
2. Run up $35 trillion in national debt.
Keep adding $1 trillion to it each 100 days. Defame anyone wishing to cut wild spending as cruel and inhumane.
3. Appease or subsidize enemies like Iran and China.
Demonize allies like Israel. Allow terrorists to attack Americans without adequate response. See Islam as either similar or superior to Christianity. Make amends to l*****t governments for supposedly past toxic American international behavior. Follow the lead of international agencies like the U.N., ICC and WHO to atone for past American neocolonial and imperialist behavior. Recede to second-tier international status, befitting American decline.
4. In a multiracial democracy, redefine identity only as one’s tribal affiliation.
Ensure each identity group rivals the other for victimhood and the state spoils it confers. Reboot all political issues by race and sex oppressors and oppressed. Destroy all meritocratic standards of admission, retention, promotion and commendation.
5. Recalibrate violent crime as understandable, cry-of-the-heart expressions of social justice. Ensure no bail and same-day release for arrested, repeat violent felons. Empathize with the violent k**ler and rapist; ignore their victims, especially if they are slain police officers.
6. Emasculate the military by using non-meritocratic standards of race, g****r, and sexual orientation to determine promotion and commendation.
Deliberately impugn as r****ts and i**********nists the largest demographic in the military who in recent wars died at twice their numbers in the population — so that they leave or never join the military. Encourage retired high officers to slander their commander-in-chief. Cut the defense budget. Stop producing sufficient weapons, but leave billions of dollars’ worth of arms to terrorists.
7. Reinvent the justice system to indict, bankrupt, convict, jail and eliminate political opponents.
Use b****t removal, impeachment, civil suits, and state and federal indictments rather than e******ns to defeat an opponent. Mob the homes of non-compliant Supreme Court justices, and attack them personally by name.
8. Encourage the fusion of the bureaucratic state with the electronic media to form a powerful force for political audit, surveillance, censorship and coercion.
Marry the FBI to Silicon Valley and hire its contractors to warp the news and hound supposed enemies of the people.
9. Make war on affordable gasoline and natural gas.
Substitute inefficient, unreliable and expensive wind and solar power, even as energy prices nearly bankrupt the middle class.
10. Marry late, but preferably not at all.
Consider males toxic, especially boys. Have no children, or as few as possible. Otherwise, assure children they are entitled, and must be sheltered. Raise them to have grievances against past generations and current norms.
11. Turn world-class universities into indoctrination centers.
Suspend the Bill of Rights on campuses. Train youth to graduate despising their own culture and civilization. Recruit foreign students from hostile nations to subsidize campus commissar bloat. Replace the curriculum with therapeutic propaganda. Ban the SAT/ACT and do not evaluate comparative high school GPAs. Ensure merit does not select the student body. Charge tuition higher than the rate of inflation. Bill the government when students default on their loans.
Why could those controlling the president be doing all of the above?
1. They are delusional and think their socialist and g*******t agendas are working and will save us.
2. They are raging nihilists who do not like the U.S. and deliberately want it destroyed as a service to the world. A ruined U.S. is preferable to a strong America.
3. They are Jacobin revolutionaries who are intentionally erasing the old United States as a prerequisite for creating an entirely new America that will arise from the ashes with no trace or even memory of its past.
4. They have no agenda. They are aimless fools and utter incompetents. These bunglers just wing it day-to-day, in response to what their radical media, academic and political masters dictate is necessary for them to retain power. They have no idea of the damage they are doing.
5. A bit of 1-3, but probably not 4.
There is cause for hope among this nihilist remaking of America: the people are fed up and will demand an accounting in the fall.

March 5, 2024 | Kevin Haggerty—BPR-PRINTED OFF 4/4/24
Elon Musk warned “something far worse than 9/11” could be on the horizon in response to a Biden administration admission on “operational vulnerabilities” present in a little-known flight scheme. Ahead of President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, the border crisis has leapfrogged to the top of v**er concerns as the murder of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley and other tragedies attributed to i*****l a***ns have become widely known.
While the White House endeavored to blame three years of policy on the GOP’s recent response to a foreign aid package, a new report from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) showed how complicit the incumbent has been in eroding national sovereignty and national security by ferrying hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals into the country.
“This administration is both importing v**ers and creating a national security threat from unvetted i*****l i*******ts,” wrote Musk on X with a screenshot of a Daily Mail headline that read, “Biden administration ADMITS flying 320,000 migrants secretly into the U.S. to reduce the number of crossing at the border has national security ‘vulnerabilities.'”
The tech entrepreneur warned, “It is highly probable that the groundwork is being laid for something far worse than 9/11. Just a matter of time.”
According to the CIS report, “But while large immigrant-receiving cities and media lay blame for the influx on Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s busing program, CBP has withheld from the Center — and apparently will not disclose — the names of the 43 U.S. airports that have received 320,000 inadmissible aliens from January through December 2023, nor the foreign airports from which they departed.”
A response from CBP lawyers detailed in part, “…identify information for air ports of entry, which, if disclosed would reveal information about the relative number of individuals arriving, and thus resources expended at particular airports which would, either standing alone or combined with other information, reveal operational vulnerabilities that could be exploited by bad actors altering their patterns of conduct, adopting new methods of operation, and taking other countermeasures, thereby undermining CBP’s law enforcement efforts to secure the United States borders.”
In other words, the federal government admitted that as hundreds of individuals on the FBI terror watchlist have been arrested entering the country illegally at the border, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) One app’s little-known use of securing flights into the country readily undermined the Department of Homeland Security’s responsibilities.
Along with not disclosing the airports in the U.S. to which i*****l a***ns were being t***sported, CBP did not detail the countries of origin for those flights. CIS did note eligibility for the CBP One app had been extended to citizens of Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Venezuela.
Musk had recently called out Biden for attempting to shift blame on the border crisis and shared, “The massive flood of i*****l i*********n is due to 94 executive actions by the Biden administration. Until those executive actions are revoked, claims by Biden that he wants to address i*****l i*********n are a bold-faced lie.”
In February, former President Donald Trump pointed to the unchecked crisis and told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo, “…I believe we’re going to have a terrorist attack — 100%. 100%. You know, during my term I did no terrorist attacks. You know that, right? I had all sorts of bans on people from certain countries. I had bans all over the place. We had no attack. I had nothing.”
Others reacted to word of the flight program as further proof of managed decline.

Chuck Ross—WASHINGTON FREE BEACON—printed off 4/4/24
March 1, 2024
First brother Jim Biden provided explosive new details about his nephew H****r B***n’s previously undisclosed meetings with a corrupt Chinese businessman, whom H****r has called the "f—ing spy chief of China."
FreeBeacon
Pence: Israel ‘Has No Choice’ But to Invade Rafah and ‘Destroy Hamas Once and for All’
Read more
In a congressional deposition last month, Jim Biden said he accompanied H****r B***n to Hong Kong in September 2017 to meet with Patrick Ho, an executive with Chinese energy conglomerate CEFC China Energy. Weeks earlier, CEFC China Energy paid H****r and Jim Biden $5 million as part of a joint venture to find investments for the Chinese firm.
The Biden family’s arrangement with CEFC China Energy has stoked national security concerns because of the Chinese firm’s links to Chinese military intelligence. Middlemen for CEFC China Energy approached H****r B***n in 2015, when his father was vice president, about potential business deals.
According to Jim Biden, he and H****r B***n had a "pleasant" lunch in Hong Kong with Ho, who also served as head of the China Energy Fund Committee, a think tank funded by CEFC China Energy. At the end of the meeting, Ho asked to meet alone with H****r B***n, according to Uncle Jim.
"Ho said, ‘Can I borrow H****r for, you know, a half-hour? We're going to go in the next room,’" said Jim Biden, who claimed ignorance about what his nephew discussed behind closed doors.
Biden’s testimony is likely to raise questions about H****r’s previously unknown interaction with a man he has described as "the f—ing spy chief of China." H****r B***n made that remark about Ho in an audio recording dated May 11, 2018.
Just two months after H****r B***n’s secret conclave with Ho, federal prosecutors in New York indicted Ho on charges that he offered bribes to African officials to obtain oil rights for CEFC China Energy during a meeting at the UN General Assembly in 2014.
CEFC China Energy paid H****r B***n $1 million to represent Ho, though H****r B***n appears not to have done any legal work on the case. According to court records, the American government obtained Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants to surveil Ho on the basis that he was a possible agent of a foreign government.
Jim Biden provided congressional investigators other details about how CEFC China Energy entered the Biden orbit. He said that the father of a classmate of H****r B***n’s daughter contacted Biden about working with CEFC China Energy. Jim Biden said the man gave H****r B***n a diamond ring. The Washington Free Beacon reported that the man, Scott Oh, approached H****r B***n in October 2015 to discuss "investment opportunities" involving CEFC China Energy.
Jim Biden told lawmakers he had no idea why his nephew was invited to Hong Kong to meet with Ho, a claim that was met with skepticism from Republicans in the deposition.
"If [H****r] wanted to volunteer what it was, he would've told me. I didn't pry into what he was doing," Biden testified.
Jim Biden said he hired a former Secret Service official who worked on President Joe Biden’s security detail to investigate Ho before the trip. He said the background check did not reveal anything negative about Ho.
Republicans said they found it "odd" that Jim Biden "would go to such lengths to hire a private investigator" to check into Patrick Ho, but that he wouldn’t ask H****r B***n the purpose of the Hong Kong trip.
"The way that we deal in my family, it wasn’t odd," Biden replied.
Published under: CEFC China Energy , Espionage , H****r B***n , Jim Biden

3/2/24---printed off 4/4/24--
The President and members of Congress have failed to live up to their oaths of office because there's an invasion of the United States underway through the Southwestern border and nothing is being done to stop it.
The invasion is not new, and it's not just the current President and Congress that's culpable, but the ones before, the ones before that and the ones before that. It's been going on for years.
And neither Democrats nor Republicans have made any effort to close the borders to stem the tide of i******s despite the calls by residents of Border States to do so and despite the threat that someone could use our porous border security as a way to smuggle in terrorists and their weapons.
In December of last year, the U.S. southern border saw its highest rate of i*****l m*****t encounters ever recorded. Sources with Customs and Border Patrol said that between Dec. 1 and December 31, more than 302,000 migrants were documented attempting to cross the U.S. southern border.
Right thinking people are now asking of the f*****ts in power, "What part of ‘illegal' don't you understand?"
Know this: They understand perfectly. They just don't want to do anything about it because stopping the flow doesn't fit in with their, or their sugar daddies', agenda.
Then-Vice President Joe Biden once said the U.S. needs a "constant, unrelenting stream" of new immigrants — "not dribbling [but] significant flows" because it would allow the nation's gross domestic product numbers to hike by 5.4 percent, or $1.4 trillion, over the next two decades. Simultaneously, he predicted that the deficit would drop by $850 billion. What his excuse is now we'll never know.
But we do know that Republicans — and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Big Business, Big Agriculture and homebuilders — like the influx of i******s because they provide a ready pool of labor they can hire at s***e wages.
Democrats like the influx of i******s because they provide a growing class of dependents — people ready to feed at the public trough and one day become good Democrat v**ers.
Labor unions like the influx of i******s because they provide a pool from which unions can increase their membership — and therefore increase union coffers — and offset their declining numbers.
And all of them like the influx of i******s because of the turmoil the immigration issue creates — pitting American against American and balkanizing the country — which allows the f*****ts to grasp more power.
Besides: What's to hold a politician to an oath? The words of the f*****t class mean nothing. They'll say and do anything for more control.
Our borders are now being controlled by the Mexican drug cartels. With border stations swamped, i******s are being shipped across the country, given all manner of benefits no American gets, given a court date and set free. The kids are carrying all manner of Third World diseases. There is a refugee crisis in Texas. It's a crisis of political making, and it's intentional. America is being t***sformed before our eyes.
There is a immigrant crisis in New York, to the point where they have thrown students out of school to make room for them. Elon Musk warned on his X platform, citing Gov. Maura Healey's (D-MA) request that families shelter immigrants in their houses, that "This is what happens when you run out of hotel rooms. Soon, cities will run out of schools to vacate. Then they will come for your homes."
Blame game
As Zerohedge recently reported, "A network of NGOs, or non-governmental organizations, seems to be playing a powerful role in coordinating the large-scale invasion of i******s at the US southern border. The new website Muckraker revealed a treasure trove of "mass migration blueprints," handed out by NGOs across South and Central America to i******s with details about their route to the US."
The maps, handed out by groups like Doctors Without Borders, show i******s from south of the US, in detail, how to traverse Mexico, exactly where to get help in doing so, and how to safely make it to the US border.
Present and Past
Polls consistently show most Americans think there is indeed an "invasion" at our southern border, and as many as 77 percent of the nation wants the i******s deported. That's because the American people actually care about the country and recognize that the sudden influx of i******s will t***sform the Nation's culture, steal what few jobs there are available and drive down wages; whereas the political establishment cares only about money and power and pleasing its corporate masters.
The Founders, though living in a new Nation with a population consisting mostly of recent immigrants, recognized the danger of too many aliens arriving at once without the desire to assimilate into the "spirit" of the new country.
"[Emigrants] will bring with them the principles of governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth;" Thomas Jefferson wrote in his "Notes on the State of Virginia," "or, if able to throw off, it will be in exchange for unbounded licentiousness, passing, as is usual, from one extreme to the other. It would be a miracle if they were to stop precisely at the point of temperate liberty."
And writing "an Examination of the President's Message" in 1802 for the New York Evening Post, Alexander Hamilton posited that, "Some reasonable term ought to be allowed to enable aliens to get rid of foreign and acquire American attachments; to learn the principles and imbibe the spirit of our government; and to admit of a probability at least, of their feeling a real interest in our affairs."
Unfortunately, the psychopathic political class remains unbothered by such "trivial" matters as whether the immigrants will ever "learn the principals and imbibe the spirit of our government."
For Democrats, they see the prospect of a host of dependent class v**ers who favor socialism. The Democrats' chief funders, the unions, see countless new unionized zombies to exploit in order to fill their coffers. The Republican establishment wants amnesty to please its corporate masters and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
The battle over i*****l i*********n is nothing more than a power and money play among the elites to the detriment of the people.

Yours for the t***h,

Bob Livingston
Editor, The Bob Livingston Letter®

Doug Goldsmith--Daily presser—3/1/24—printed off 4/4/24
Tucker Carlson, a former Fox News personality, revealed alarming information about the Biden administration in a recent podcast.
During his appearance on the Lex Fridman podcast this week, Carlson disclosed that he had uncovered evidence of U.S. intelligence agencies surveilling his communications before his interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin. he also stated that he was warned by sources that if he conducted a lenient interview with Putin, the administration would take legal action against h
It is important for all Americans to take note of these revelations, as the intelligence agencies operate under the authority of President Joe Biden.
Here’s a partial transcript of the interview:
TUCKER CARLSON: The only reason I’m telling you [about my meeting with Snowden] is, and I didn’t tell anybody, and I didn’t text it to anybody, OK, except him.
“Semafor” runs this piece saying, report “reporting” information they got from the US intel agencies leaking against me, using my money in my name in a supposedly free country. They run this piece saying I’d met with Snowden like it was a crime or something.
So again, my interest is in the United States, in preserving freedoms here, the ones that I grew up with. And if you have a media establishment that acts as an auxiliary of, or acts as employees of, the national security state, you don’t have a free country and that’s where we are. And I’m not guessing because I spent my entire life in that world, 33 years. I worked in big news companies, so I know how it works. I know the people involved in it. I could name them. Ben Smith of Semafor, among many others. And I find that really objectionable, not just on principle either — in effect, in practice. You don’t want to live in that kind of country.
People externalize all of their anxiety about this, I have noticed. So it’s like,l “Russia is not free!” Yeah, I know. You know, neither is, you know, Burkina Faso. Like, most countries aren’t free, actually. But we are, we are the United States, we’re different. That’s my concern. Preserving that is my concern.
So they get so exercised about what’s happening in other parts of the world, places they’ve never been and know nothing about. It’s almost a way of ignoring what’s happening in their own country right around them. I find it so strange and sad and weird.
LEX FRIDMAN: So, the NSA was tracking you, do you think CIA was? Do you think people still tracking you?
TUCKER CARLSON: Look, one of the things I did before I went, just because of the business I’m in, all of us are in, and just because we live here, you know, we all have theories about secure communications channels, like Signal is secure, Telegraph isn’t, or WhatsApp is owned by Mark Zuckerberg, you can’t trust it. I said, OK, so I thought, you know, before I go over here, I was getting all this, we’re having all these conversations, my producers and I about this, and I decided, you know, I’m just gonna, I’m just gonna actually find out like what’s really going on.
So I talked to two people who would know, trust me. And that’s all I can say. And I, I h**e to be like, “Oh, I talk to people who know.” But I mean, they would know, and both of them said exactly the same thing, which is, “Are you joking? Nothing is secure. Everything is monitored all the time.” If state actors are involved. I mean, you can keep the Malaysian mafia from reading your texts probably, you can not keep the big intel services from reading your texts. It’s not possible, any of them. Or listening to your calls.
So, and that was the firm conclusion of people who’ve been involved in it for a long time, decades, in both cases. So I just thought, you know what? I don’t care. I don’t care. I’m not sending a ton of naked pictures of myself to anybody… I travel with three people I work with, who I love, and who I’ve been around the world with for many years. They all got separate phones and left the other phone back in New York or wh**ever.
I just decided I don’t care, actually, and I resent having no privacy because privacy is a prerequisite for freedom, but I can’t change it. And so I have the same surveilled cell phone and, you know, I do switch them out because if you have too much spyware on your phone, this is true, it wrecks the battery. I’m serious. It does.
LEX FRIDMAN: You say it lightly, but it’s really troublesome that, as a journalist, you would be tracked.
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, they leaked it to Semafor and they leaked it to the New York Times.
LEX FRIDMAN: So you had no fear. You know, your lawyer said, be careful which questions you asked, you said, I don’t have–
Test your sk**ls with this Quiz!
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, the lawyer said very specifically, depending on the questions you ask Putin, you know, you could be arrested or not.
And I said, “Listen to what you’re saying. You’re saying the U.S. government has like control over my questions, and they’ll arrest me if I ask the wrong question? Like, how are we better than Putin if that’s true?”
And by the way, that’s just what a lawyer said, but I can’t overstate — one of the biggest law firms in the United States, smart lawyers we’ve used for years. So I was really shocked by it.

March 1, 2024 | Chris Donaldson -BPR- printed off 4/4/24
House Republicans released the transcript of H****r B***n’s testimony in the impeachment inquiry against his father and acknowledged Joe Biden was “the big guy” mentioned in an email about a $5 million Chinese business deal.
On Thursday, House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) cut through the media gaslighting about the p**********l son’s appearance on Capitol Hill by making the lengthy transcription of the six-hour grilling publicly available so Americans can make up their own minds.
Among the bombshells contained in the 200-page transcript is the acknowledgment of the May 13, 2017 email from former business partner James Gilliar that said “10 held by H for the big guy,” breaking down the distribution from the big deal.
“I truly don’t know what the hell that James was talking about,” the younger Biden said, according to the transcript. “All I know is … what actually happened.”
The email, which was found on the infamous “laptop from hell” that was abandoned at a Delaware computer repair shop, was first reported by the New York Post in mid-October 2020, reporting that could have potentially made a difference in the e******n if it wasn’t censored by social media companies acting on the lies peddled by a collection of former spooks.
H****r B***n later claimed that Gilliar’s suggestion of cutting “the big guy” in was a “pie in the sky idea” with his dad leaving office as Barack Obama’s veep.
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“Like, ‘Joe Biden’s out of the office. Maybe we’ll be able to get him involved,’” he said. “Remember, again, is that Joe Biden, for first time in 48 years, is not an elected official and is not seeking office. And so James is probably, like, ‘Wow, wouldn’t be great if a former Vice President could be in our business together?’”
He also claimed that if he had seen Gilliar’s email at the time, “I would have picked up the phone and said, ‘You’re out of your mind.’”
“I shut it down, and the evidence of me shutting it down is the actual things you have as evidence,” the president’s son said.
“Remember that. The agreement, the executed agreement, the executed agreement to create a company that was never operated, that’s what happened. That’s the evidence you have … Nothing to do with my dad, zero,” he insisted.
The allegedly recovered crackhead also repeatedly blamed his drug and alcohol addiction, telling investigators that he was at times too “drunk and high” to recall certain incidents and that he didn’t remember leaving the laptop at the repair shop.
The younger Biden has sought to leverage his taste for the crack rock for sympathy in a public relations blitz coinciding with his legal troubles.
“Maybe it’s the ultimate test for a recovering addict — I don’t know,” he told Axios reporter Alex Thompson in a rare interview with the Biden-friendly outlet. “I have always been in awe of people who have stayed clean and sober through tragedies and obstacles few people ever face. They are my heroes, my inspiration.”
“I have something much bigger than even myself at stake. We are in the middle of a fight for the future of democracy,” he said.

April 4, 2024-printed off 4/4/24
Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
When Russia invaded Ukraine, Americans overwhelmingly supported Ukraine—as they did with Israel after October 7. No wonder: Ukraine was surprise attacked by Russia, and Israel was by Hamas.
It seemed an easy binary of good versus evil: both the attacked Ukraine and Israel are pro-Western. Both their attackers, anti-Western Russia and Hamas, are not. Now everything is bifurcating. And the politics of the wars in America reflect incoherence. Both Ukraine and Israel are portrayed in the media as supposedly bogging down in their counteroffensives.
More pro-Israel Republicans are troubled by Ukraine’s strategy, or lack thereof, in an increasing Somme-like stalemate.Yet more pro-Ukrainian Democrats are turning away from Israel as it dismantles Gaza in the messy, bloody slog against Hamas. The left claims either Israel cannot or should not defeat Hamas, or at least at the present cost.
So the left pushes Israel to a ceasefire with Hamas.
It blasts Israeli “disproportionate” responses.
It demands that Israel avoid collateral damage.
It pressures it to form a wartime bipartisan government.
It lobbies to cut it off from American resupply.
It is terrified that Israel will expand the war by responding to aggression from Hezbollah and Iran.
Yet on Ukraine, the left oddly pivots to the very opposite agenda.
It believes Ukraine should not be forced to make peace with Russian “f*****ts.” It must become disproportionate to “win” the war.
President Zelensky deserves a pass, despite cancelling e******ns while suspending political parties.
America must step up its resupply to Kyiv with more and far deadlier weapons.
Ukraine has a perfect right to hit targets inside Russia.
Russian threats to widen the war should be considered empty and thus ignored. America should h**e Russia far more than Hamas. By contrast, conservatives are less supportive of Ukraine’s offensives, if more than ever allied with Israel.
In their realist views, Ukraine is a smaller power, vastly outnumbered by a richer, better-armed Russia. Thus, it should negotiate while it can, rather than eventually losing everything.
Israel, however, is, in their view, defeating Hamas. If allowed to finish the job, it can soon win the war in Gaza and still handle Hezbollah and deter Iran.
Furthermore, the right is wary that Russia is a nuclear power. The Ukraine war is unfortunately creating a new, potent anti-American axis of Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea and drawing in former U.S. allies like Turkey and Qatar.
Yet, in Israel’s case, the U.S. is far more powerful than Hamas’s patron, Iran, and can easily deter it should Tehran intervene.
As of now, none of Hamas’s allies have nuclear weapons. Israel, however, does, unlike Ukraine.
Many conservatives further point out that Israel is a long-time U.S. democratic ally.
Ukraine’s e******ns are currently suspended while the country remains under martial law.
In realist terms, the old idea of Russian triangulation still makes some sense. Russia should be no friendlier to China than to the U.S., and China is no more aligned with Russia than with America.
Hamas, by contrast, is a terrorist clique, as are Hezbollah and all of Iran’s terrorist appendages. Their hatred of the U.S. is long-standing, immutable, and transcends the Gaza war.
How about the public’s views in general?
With over $35 trillion in debt, still smarting over the humiliating withdrawal from Kabul, and the military short 40,000 recruits, the public does not wish to get heavily involved in either war, even as polls still show radically differing left/right attitudes toward both.
Americans once overwhelmingly supported vast aid for Ukraine. Now they decidedly believe the U.S. is providing too much to Kyiv.
They still poll strong support for Israel over Hamas, but less so for Israel’s ongoing destruction of Hamas given the collateral damage that follows.
Given there are few Russian-Americans, there are almost no demonstrations on behalf of Moscow’s war. But there are plenty of protests for Hamas since there are lots of Middle-Eastern Americans and visitors within the U.S.
What are we to conclude about these contradictory wars and American attitudes toward them?
The more democratic and defensive the power, the more Americans support it—but only up to a point.
Even more, they demand quick victory—and lose interest when the wars stagnate, costs increase, and protests grow.
When Ukraine and Israel began costly counteroffensives, the former losing thousands and the latter k*****g thousands, the American public began to be less invested in either war.
Final lessons?
Israel should do all it can to destroy Hamas as quickly as possible and end the war.
Ukraine does not have the wherewithal to defeat Russia. It should cease costly offensives against Russia’s fortified lines and seek to negotiate.
Or, put another way, fickle Americans sympathize with those who are attacked. But their continuing support seems contingent on whether the victim can remain sympathetic—and win decisively to end the war rapidly.

By Nicole Wells-NEWSMAX- April 2024—printed off 4/3/24
When it comes to the 2024 e******n, President Joe Biden's "greatest threat" isn't former President Donald Trump, one Democrat analyst says. "I don't think the greatest threat to Joe Biden is Donald Trump," CNN political analyst and former South Carolina state representative Bakari Sellers said on CNN Newsroom. According to Sellers, the bigger threat to Biden's bid for ree******n is v**ers who stay home instead of coming out to v**e in November.
"The problem with Joe Biden is he has to be able to go out and woo many of these v**ers who are somewhat uninspired, who are looking for cessation of fire in the war in Gaza," Sellers said. "It's a number of issues motivating young v**ers, making sure that Black v**ers understand what your message is and how this is going to look going forward." Though Biden has already secured the 2024 Democrat p**********l nomination, he faced some pushback in some state primaries from v**ers opposed to his position on the Israel-Hamas war. Last month, his administration's support of Israel's offensive in the Gaza Strip caused Biden some issues in the swing state of Michigan, which he narrowly won in 2020 and which has a significant Muslim population.
In protest, more than 100,000 Michigan primary v**ers cast their b****ts for "uncommitted." Recent polling of the race between Biden and Trump, who is the presumptive 2024 GOP p**********l nominee, shows a neck-and-neck contest. Cameron Easley of Morning Consult shared an updated p**********l tracking poll on X on Monday and commented on Biden's slight lead.
"Biden maintains his lead over Trump (he's +2 now)," Easley wrote. "Perhaps more notably, he's tied with Trump among independents. It's the first time Trump hasn't led among these key v**ers since late November." On Wednesday, Heath Brown, associate professor of public policy at City University of New York, told Newsweek that the race between the current and former president is tightening. "These latest polls confirm that this campaign is very close and will likely remain that way for the foreseeable future," Brown said. A poll from NPR/PBS/Marist from last month found 50% of respondents supported Biden, while 48% supported Trump. The conflict in Gaza looks to remain a top issue heading into the next e******n, with many pro-Palestinian v**ers continuing to call on Biden to broker a cease-fire in Gaza and the president's relationship with Israel increasingly frayed.

April 3, 2024-Victor Davis Hanson- THE BLADES OF PERESUS—PRINTED OFF 4/3/24
For the first 50 years of my rural existence, I don’t think I encountered more than 10 trespassing cars parked in the orchards or vineyards (one a decade)—aside from the intoxicated drivers who left the main road, veered off the pavement, destroyed several trees or vines, and abandoned their automobiles or trucks (usually full of beer cans or wine bottles).
They were an odd bunch. Usually, the highway patrol came out and towed away the vehicle, insisting I could not have it impounded for any damage suffered. The insurance never covered the wreckage. The drivers never paid any compensation. In all five cases, the drivers spoke little if any English, and apparently in those days feared deportation if they stayed to claim their wrecked cars. The one time I towed a wreck with the tractor into the yard and chained it, I was told by the highway patrol officer that I was the offender and would be cited unless I released it, even though he said there was “zero” chance the claimant of the impounded car would ever pay for damages.
None to my knowledge suffered any personal injury since they ran quickly away. The ground always was soft given it was irrigated, disked, or furrowed. The wire of the vineyard usually hit the hood and gradually slowed the vehicle down as it passed through several rows.
In the case of the trees, the lower branches usually buffered the collision and were usually sheared off from the stump. The wrecks usually occurred on Sunday afternoons.
I used to calculate the loss of 10-15 vines or 3-4 trees for 3-4 years’ worth of production, the effort to clean away the mess, and replant, and then I computed the extra care needed to nurture replacement trees and vines in a mature vineyard or orchard. And the net cost again was several thousand dollars.
Yet other than these hit-and-run incidents, during my first half-century on the farm, I rarely encountered trespassers or criminals.
The few I bumped into on nightly walks were parked cars with teens having carnal relations or drinking beer or shooting illegally ducks or doves and quail, or simply trying to blast with shotguns great horned owls or red-tailed hawks for the sick sight of k*****g a noble bird. Misguided, vicious to animals, and reckless no doubt, but not necessarily criminals by any means. But again, any encounter was very rare.
In the last decade, everything has changed.
The collapse of rural calm can be calibrated by the growing influx from open borders, the flight of small farmers who sold out and moved away, the near complete t***sformation from homeowners to renters residing in the farmhouses of absentee corporate owners, and of course the decline of civilized life in the United States in general.
Now I expect each week to have one encounter with someone injecting drugs, fornicating, stealing, dumping trash, stripping down a stolen car, shooting a semi-automatic weapon, or horribile dictu beating his wife or girlfriend (apparently on the theory to do so in the country means no one will hear the cries of the assaulted; my one intervention saw both victim and victimizer threaten me, as her shrieking turned from him to me for interfering!).
Yet these last 10 days I had three unusual “encounters,” more so than in past years. The first was coming upon an industrial freezer—it must have weighed over 500 pounds—dumped in an orchard row. It would have required two or three people to toss it out of a truck.
What was the thinking, the rationale of the nocturnal dumpers? That someone else would cart their detritus away? That the $25 fee at the local dump was too costly? That it was their right to discard such a huge piece of junk on someone’s property, and thus the obligation of the owner to haul their cast-offs away?
Is the mindset one of entitlement? One of hatred? One of selfishness? One that the immigrant is exempt from the laws and obligations of the citizen?

BY JOE MESSINA-4/2/24---printed off 4/2/24
According to the Daily Mail, a city official in Denver is encouraging migrant families arriving in Colorado to consider relocating to cities like Chicago and New York due to limited resources in the state. Communications liaison Andres Carrera advised migrant arrivals to seek support in other parts of the country, emphasizing that cities like New York and Chicago offer more job opportunities.
Mayor Mike Johnston mentioned that Denver has allocated over $100 million for asylum seekers’ housing, education, and medical care, but this amount could increase to $180 million, representing 15% of the city’s annual budget. USA Today recently reported that over 40,000 migrants have arrived in Denver in less than a year, posing challenges for city officials in providing for them while also meeting the needs of taxpayers amidst escalating rent prices and a housing shortage.
Despite Denver being a sanctuary city, the surge of migrants has strained the city’s resources. City officials are contemplating budget reductions to sustain support for migrants, but neighboring cities have declined to offer assistance. These newcomers were allegedly relocated to Denver as part of an initiative led by Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R), who aims to send migrants to Democratic-run cities to highlight perceived shortcomings in President Joe Biden’s immigration policy.
“The lead importer of migrants to New York is not Texas, it’s Joe Biden,” Abbott said at an event held by the Manhattan Institute. “It’s a crisis. It’s chaotic and it must stop.” Carrera went on to tell the crowd that Denver has “received too many migrants” and that the city has run out of resources. “If you stay here, you are going to suffer even more and I don’t want to see this.”
Carrera added that officials would be willing to buy migrants tickets to “any city” they wished to go, adding that they could even go “up to the Canadian border.”
According to reports, Denver has imposed restrictions on the duration of stay for new arrivals in city shelters, allowing individuals to stay for a maximum of two weeks and families with children for up to six weeks. Many of these cities have long p***ed themselves on providing a safe haven for undocumented immigrants, offering protection from deportation and often refusing to cooperate with federal immigration authorities. However, this stance has created a host of challenges and complexities that are now coming back to haunt them.
The policies of sanctuary cities have created a tense relationship with the federal government, particularly under the current administration’s hardline stance on immigration.
As a result, these cities are now facing increased pressure and scrutiny from federal authorities, leading to a crackdown on funding and resources. This has left many sanctuary cities struggling to maintain essential services and support their vulnerable populations.
In the case of New York City, Mayor de Blasio is finding himself in a difficult position as he grapples with the fallout from his city’s sanctuary policies. The strain on resources and infrastructure has reached a breaking point, forcing him to turn to the federal government for assistance. This move is seen as a desperate plea for help in dealing with the mess that has been created by years of contentious immigration policies.
Overall, sanctuary cities are facing an uphill battle as they navigate the complex intersection of local and federal i*********n l*ws.
The need for assistance from the federal government highlights the challenges and consequences of their problematic approach to immigration enforcement.

April 2, 2024—printed off 4/2/24--Victor Davis Hanson
Given the radical shift to 70 percent of the e*****rate not v****g on E******n Day as the traditional b****t rejection rate dived by a magnitude, given the billions of dollars that will be pledged to stop Donald Trump, and given the use of lawfare to restrict his availability on the campaign trail, Trump will have to win the popular v**e in key swing states by 4-5 percent. Only that way can he ensure that around 11:00 PM his sizable leads do not suddenly melt on the nation’s television screens, as troves of mail-in b****ts begin flooding the tabulators.
Yet millions of 2020 Biden v**ers—Latinos and B****s especially—are fed up with the failed Biden agendas and policies. Minorities are beginning to feel discontent with the out-of-touch Latino and Black elite and their agendas of c*****e c****e, t*********rism, defunding the police, cutting back on f****l f**ls, and opposition to charter schools and vouchers, in the very way that poorer w****s now look upon the bicoastal white privileged—always pushing utopian schemes, but exempt from the painful consequences of their nonsense that always fall on the less fortunate.
Suburbanites, swing v**ers, Independents, and so-called soccer moms want a sociably acceptable way of v****g for Trump, given they know his policies worked and that Biden’s have not only failed but are dangerous to their very viability. So what must Trump do to make it “OK” for those who like what Trump once accomplished—but do not like him—to v**e for their own interests?
He must focus on his “Contract for America” and promise to hire thousands of qualified conservatives to spearhead the radical changes necessary to return to normalcy. That is, Trump must reassure his potential new v**ers that he is the “normal” candidate and that Biden is the weird, dangerous outlier, whose record is as unsettling as is Biden’s own weird persona.
But all that requires not only the discipline to find better, capable conservatives and to stick to an agenda that undoes the damage of the last four years. It also means Trump must envision the 2024 e******n to be not about himself, but about the nation’s last real chance to regain normality and to win both houses of Congress and the presidency. And then in the first 100 days, he must implement a vision that will end the woke madness, the therapeutic appeasement overseas, the c*****e c****e hysteria, the racial segregationists, the critical legal/race theorists, the open border g*******ts, and the “demography is destiny”/“new Democratic majority” operatives.
That means Trump has no time, no margin of error to detour into cul-de-sacs about “birdbrain” Nikki Hayley. He has no time to give live tit-for-tat blogging during the Oscars. He has no time to troll the Left by claiming that he might have told Putin to go ahead if he wished to invade delinquent paying NATO members.
Instead, Trump must envision the e******n as a last-chance American restoration agenda—to restore the border, deterrence, affordability, and safety, all more or less destroyed by the most leftwing administration in our history.
Trump, then, is not running for revenge, redemption, not for anything other than the last chance for America to reclaim its identity and values that once made us great. He is running for a landslide, a total repudiation of the leftwing insanity of the last four years, a national unity campaign of those that might otherwise not like him.
And that necessary 11th-hour mission requires Trump to be disciplined 24/7, and to speak and act in a fashion that reassures the new potential Trump v**er that he is their very last chance.

April 1, 2024—printed off 4/2/24
Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
In a recent 60 Minutes interview, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador—who prefers to be known as AMLO for short—issued to the Biden administration blackmail demands that sounded more like existential threats. AMLO warned the U.S. that the current influx of some 10 million i*****l a***ns through the southern border will most certainly continue—unless America agrees to his ultimatums.
One, Obrador says the U.S. must now send $20 billion in de facto bribery payments to Latin American nations, many of them corrupt and dysfunctional. Apparently, he thinks it is America’s fault that millions of Latin Americans are fleeing these failed states northward, not the inept and corrupt governments that create such misery.
Two, AMLO demands amnesty for vast numbers of Mexican i*****l a***ns currently unlawfully residing inside the U.S. He apparently also thinks there is no such thing as U.S. i*********n l*w. Or, if there is, such statutes do not apply to citizens of Mexico. Can we ask Mr. Obrador to simply grant permanent visa-free, no-questions-asked residence to any American living in a vacation complex in Mexico?
Three, he also requires America to lift sanctions against anti-American Venezuela. That c*******t government currently is part of the new China/Russia/Iran strategic axis. It is sending thousands of its citizens northward to enter the U.S. illegally. Many of them are criminals, as the recent murder of Laken Riley by a felonious Venezuelan i*****l a***n attests. Dictator Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuelan regime recently threatened to invade and annex oil-rich Guyana, its smaller neighbor to the east. Maduro’s “security forces” have routinely murdered hundreds of political opponents. This rogue state is apparently Mexico’s newest ally.
Four, AMLO further requires the U.S. to stop its long embargo of c*******t Castroite-controlled Cuba, a decades-long avowed enemy of the U.S. And what, AMLO was asked, would happen if the U.S. were to refuse Mexico’s blackmail threats? Obrador abruptly snapped, “The flow of migrants will continue”—an admission that Obrador himself has the power to stop or turn on i*****l i*******t influxes into the U.S.
T***slated, that means we can expect that another 2-3 million i*****l a***ns will leave Mexican territory to enter the U.S. unlawfully in 2024. Or if Joe Biden is attuned to the political disaster he has created by i*****l i*********n for his party in November, we should expect this cynical administration quietly—in the fashion on the eve of the last midterms of cancelling student loans, draining the strategic petroleum reserve, or currently slow-walking resupplies to Israel—to send cash to Obrador to limit inflows before the e******n.
In his long interview, AMLO also denied that Mexico is one of the most violent countries in the world, despite currently having the ninth highest murder rate among nations. AMLO claims further that there is no corruption in America, although Mexico also ranks among the world’s most corrupt nations.
As far as the nearly 100,000 American deaths per year attributed to Mexican cartel-produced and illegally imported f******l—often deliberately disguised as both illicit and prescription drugs to mask its toxicity and increase its usage—Obrador claims that the fault is solely on Americans who take the drug. He believes Mexicans simply supply the demand regardless of its legality and in such a way to ensure thousands of accidental overdoses.
AMLO adds quite dishonestly that there is no real drug use in Mexico. Consequently, the cartels supposedly do not threaten the stability of his government. He apparently shrugs that they are an American, not Mexican, problem, despite the cartels’ annual murdering of several hundred Mexican politicians and candidates.
Finally, under his “Mexico First” policy, AMLO warns he will not pass any law or adopt any policy that is American-inspired.
Much of AMLO periodic tough-guy rhetoric—in the past he has bragged of the huge expatriate Mexican community and the power it now exercises over American politics—is simply the bluster of an insecure, smaller neighbor overshadowed by its northern colossus, and both mindful and resentful of an often shared troublesome history.
In addition, Obrador is a radical socialist. He believes a nation’s prosperity is achieved through forced state, or indeed, international redistribution from the wealthier to the poorer—not by guarantees of free markets, individual freedom, consensual government, or the rule of law. Thus, Mexico’s problem is not its misuse of rich natural resources, lack of the rule of law, corrupt federal, state, and local governments, or the cartels, but simply exploitation by its northern neighbor. Obrador never asks himself why a resource-poor Japan or Switzerland is rich and a resource-rich Mexico is poor.
Two further questions arise in response to Obrador’s unhinged hostility. One, why is AMLO now so emboldened to threaten the United States with even more millions of i*****l a***ns leaving Mexico soil to enter the U.S. unlawfully?
And two, how will America answer such a belligerent neighbor?
Obrador is feisty and full of anti-American venom now for a lot of reasons. One, he was easily able to t***sit from his country 10 million i*****l i*******ts into the United States. He believes that with the existing 50 million foreign-born American residents, America is rapidly becoming a country of enough Latin American ex-patriates to ensure Mexico’s influence over American policy.
In projectionist fashion, Obrador also believes that the American melting pot is dead, replaced by the tribalist salad bowl, in which ethnic groups form large, permanent, and unassimilated blocs and vie for government money and influence against rival ethnicities.
In such a Hobbesian U.S., Latinos, Obrador believes, will come out on top and thus greenlight Mexico’s agenda. The idea that Mexican immigrants will likely quickly assimilate, integrate, and replace their Mexican identity and allegiance with an American persona, he believes, is now passé.
More disturbingly, AMLO assumes that Biden deliberately destroyed the U.S. border in order to welcome in the world’s poor and needy en masse. Biden, he believes, is engineering the new demographics. He has enticed a constituency that will repay de facto amnesty with fealty at the polls, and in the next census, he will thus help redefine dozens of congressional districts to favor Democrats. Thus, Obrador thinks his open-border policies synchronize with the open-border wishes of the Biden administration.
Two, Obrador sees the U.S. dec**pling from China. Billions of dollars in American overseas investment are leaving China and being rerouted to Mexico. Hundreds of new factories producing everything from cheap consumer items to cars are now appearing in Mexico entirely for U.S. export.
Obrador assumes that without such outsourcing and offshoring to Mexico, the U.S. would suffer supply chain disruption, higher consumer prices, and shortages of vital goods—and thus be forced to return to its unhealthy dependence on China. So he believes Mexican labor in the U.S. and Mexican factories at home are indispensable to the U.S. economy, and thus he can say or do what he wishes to any president he chooses.
Three, while Obrador was for a while scared of Trump, he has utter contempt for the bumbling Biden administration in general, and, in particular, for an enfeebled Joe Biden himself. On a recent Biden trip to Mexico, Obrador beamed as he was filmed personally propping up a shaky Biden as he descended from the stage.
In Obrador’s view, any country that would open wide its border, welcome in 10 million foreign nationals, without legal sanction, without audit, without even processing, deserves the contempt he extends to it.
Just as he scans the world stage and sees Biden’s humiliating exit from Afghanistan, its passive response to serial Iranian-fueled terrorist attacks on American installations in the Middle East, and its passivity when China launched a spy balloon over the U.S., so too, like other American belligerents, Obrador feels Biden’s America is now there for the taking. Thus his emboldened threats that no Mexican president of the past has ever leveled.
Finally, what can the U.S. do to reestablish its sovereignty and remind Mexico that its belligerency, its export of deadly f******l, its deliberate sandbagging of U.S. i*********n l*w, its alliances with America’s worst enemies, and its greenlighting of the Mexican cartels’ anti-American, t***sborder mayhem all have existential consequences?
So what should the next president do to restore mutual respect and cooperation between our once amicable two countries? Five easy steps.
1. Quietly finish the wall across the entire border.
2. Begin deporting to Mexico the ten million i*****l a***ns who have unlawfully entered and resided in the U.S. over the last three years. Let Mexico disperse them to their countries of origin.
3. Tax at 10% the $60 billion in remittances that annually flow into Mexico from the U.S. Remittances are Obrador’s largest source of foreign exchange and made possible only by American state and federal governments’ subsidization of Mexican national residents, that in turn frees them to send billions back home to Mexico.
4. Declare the cartels international terrorist organizations. Begin sanctioning all Mexican banks, corporations, and known Mexico officials that traffic and do business with the cartels.
5. Deploy the U.S. military to the border, not merely to create deterrence and aid the border patrol, but to end all cartel entry into the United States and to stop all unauthorized cross-border intrusions by Mexican paramilitaries.
Do all that, and paradoxically, Obrador will begin praising the U.S. and ask once again to cooperate in restoring a secure border.
Like so many passive-aggressive bullies, Obrador respects the strong adversaries he slanders but he has utter contempt for the weak leaders he praises.

Friday, 29 March 2024—PRINTED OFF 3/29/24—NEWSMAX- 2024 Thomson/Reuters.
U.S. prices increased moderately in February and the cost of services outside housing slowed considerably, keeping a June interest rate cut from the Federal Reserve on the table. The personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index rose 0.3% last month, the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis said Friday. Data for January was revised higher to show the PCE price index climbing 0.4% instead of 0.3% as previously reported. In the 12 months through February, PCE inflation advanced 2.5% after increasing 2.4% in January. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast the PCE price index gaining 0.4% on the month and rising 2.5% year-on-year. Price pressures are subsiding, though the pace has slowed from the first half of last year. Fed officials last week left the U.S. central bank's policy rate unchanged in the current 5.25%-5.50% range, having raised it by 525 basis points since March 2022.
Policymakers anticipate three rate cuts this year. Financial markets expect the first rate reduction in June. Fed Governor Christopher Waller said on Wednesday, "there is no rush to cut the policy rate" right now, but he did not rule out trimming borrowing costs later in the year. Excluding the volatile food and energy components, the PCE price index increased 0.3% last month. That followed an upwardly revised 0.5% gain in January. The so-called core PCE price index was previously reported to have advanced 0.4% in January. Core inflation increased 2.8% year-on-year in February after rising 2.9% in January. The Fed tracks the PCE price measures for its 2% inflation target. Monthly inflation readings of 0.2% over time are necessary to bring inflation back to target. PCE services inflation excluding energy and housing gained 0.2% last month after surging 0.7% in January. Policymakers are monitoring the so-called super core inflation to gauge their progress in fighting inflation.
Consumer spending, which accounts for more than two-thirds of U.S. economic activity, jumped 0.8% last month after increasing 0.2% in January, the report also showed.

'We have said for months now that our system is at capacity,' Gov. Maura Healey said
By Jamie Joseph Fox News
Published March 29, 2024-printed off 3/29/24
Podcast host Grace Curley joined 'Fox & Friends First' to discuss why one Democrat in Boston is turning to residents to mitigate the migrant surge and her take on border agents arresting 269 Chinese migrants in one day. Boston is preparing to house i*****l m*****ts in former veterans housing as the city's resources have been exhausted since Democratic Gov. Maura Healey declared a state of emergency over the surge last summer. The Veterans Home at Chelsea will become a "safety-net site" for migrants where, beginning May 1, they will have to prove they are working to wean off government assistance by applying for work authorizations, learning English and searching for permanent residency. "We have said for months now that our system is at capacity, and we do not have the space, providers or funding to continue expanding," Emergency Assistance Director Scott Rice said in a statement this week.
"This new certification policy is a responsible step to address the capacity constraints at our safety-net sites. Families will need to demonstrate that they’ve taken action to get on a path toward independence and out of shelter." Healey's office says the new requirements come as the state’s emergency family shelter system, which houses migrant families with children or homeless pregnant women, has been overwhelmed for months. According to the state's website, the veterans home "offers residential and long-term care programs to eligible Massachusetts veterans." Healey's office said the site is vacant and slated to be demolished since the state reopened a larger center atop Powder Horn Hill in December. "Families will be permitted to remain at sites as long as they continue to engage these services and activities," Healey's office said in a news release Monday. Jon Santiago, secretary of veterans services for Massachusetts, said, "This project operates independently and will not impact the daily routines or services at the Massachusetts Veterans Home at Chelsea." There are 240 families living in the safety-net sites, while 7,500 families reside in the state's emergency shelters. The migrant crisis has been complex for Massachusetts. The state's newest emergency shelter, located in Roxbury, a neighborhood in Boston, reached its capacity of 400 people in just one week last month.
New York City, Chicago and the state of New York all made emergency declarations last year and called for help in response to the migrant crisis.
Nikolas Lanum and Adam Shaw contributed to this report.

Director of Research Center for Immigration Studies For Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee Hearing entitled “The Impact of I*****l I*********n on Social Services,” Thursday, January 11, 2024 Summary I*****l i*******ts are a net fiscal drain, meaning they receive more in government services than they pay in taxes. This result is not due to laziness or fraud. I*****l i*******ts actually have high rates of work, and they do pay some taxes, including income and payroll taxes. The fundamental reason that i*****l i*******ts are a net drain is that they have a low average education level, which results in low average earnings and tax payments. It also means a large share qualify for welfare programs, often receiving benefits on behalf of their U.S.-born children. Like their less-educated and low-income U.S.-born counterparts, the tax payments of i*****l i*******ts do not come close to covering the cost they create. Key Points • The current surge of i*****l i*********n is unprecedented. Some 2.7 million inadmissible aliens have been released into the country by the administration since January 2021. There have also been 1.5 million “got-aways” — individuals observed entering illegally but not stopped. Visa overstays also seem to have hit a record in FY 2022. • We preliminarily estimate that the i*****l i*******t population grew to 12.8 million by October of 2023, up 2.6 million since January 2021, when the president took office. This is the net increase in the illegal population based on monthly Census Bureau data, not the number of new arrivals. • I*****l i*******ts have a negative fiscal impact -- taxes paid minus benefits received -- primarily because a large share have modest levels of education, resulting in relatively low average incomes and tax payments, along with significant use of means-tested programs and other government services. • Prior research indicates that 69 percent of adult i*****l i*******ts have no education beyond high school, compared to 35 percent of the U.S.-born. • Using the National Academies’ estimate of immigrants’ net fiscal impact by education level, we estimate that the lifetime fiscal drain (taxes paid minus costs) for each i*****l i*******t is about $68,000, although this estimate comes with some caveats. • I*****l i*******ts make extensive use of welfare. Based on government data, we estimate that 59 percent of households headed by i*****l i*******ts use one or more major welfare programs, compared to 39 percent of households headed by the U.S.-born. • Based on their use rate of major welfare programs, we estimate that i*****l i*******ts receive $42 billion in benefits, or about 4 percent of the total cost of the cash, Medicaid, food and housing programs examined in our study. However, this is only a rough approximation due to limitations in the data. • I*****l i*******ts can receive welfare on behalf of U.S.-born children. Also, i*****l i*******t children can receive school lunch/breakfast and WIC directly. A number of states provide Medicaid to some i*****l i*******ts, and a few provide SNAP. Several million i*****l i*******ts also have work authorization (e.g. DACA, TPS and some asylum applicants), allowing receipt of the EITC. • The high welfare use of i*****l i*******t households is not explained by an unwillingness to work. In fact, 94 percent of i*****l i*******t households have at least one worker, compared to only 73 percent of U.S.-born households. But the nation’s welfare system is design to help low-wage workers with children, which describes a very large share of i*****l i*******t households. • In addition to consuming welfare, i*****l i*********n makes significant use of public education. Based on average costs per student, the estimated 4 million children of i*****l i*******ts in public schools created $68.1 billion in costs in 2019. The vast majority of these children are U.S.-born. • Use of emergency medical services is another area in which i*****l i*******ts create significant fiscal costs. Prior research indicates that there are 5.8 million uninsured i*****l i*******ts in the country in 2019, accounting for a little over one-fifth of the total population without health insurance. The costs of providing care to them likely totals some $7 billion annually. • I*****l i*******ts do pay some taxes. We estimate that i*****l i*******ts in 2019 paid roughly $5.9 billion in federal income tax, $16.2 billion in Social Security tax and $3.8 billion in Medicaid taxes. However, as the net fiscal drain of $68,000 per person cited above indicates, these taxes are not nearly enough to cover the cost of the services they receive. • I*****l i*******ts do add perhaps $321 billion to the nation’s GDP, but this is not a measure of their tax contributions or the benefits they create for the U.S.-born. Almost all the increase in economic activity goes to the i*****l i*******ts themselves in the form of wages. Introduction Congress set limits on legal immigration and has allocated funds to enforce those limits for good reason. Allowing widespread i*****l i*********n raises profound concerns about a host of issues, from public safety and national security to the impact on American workers and the rule of law. While these impacts are all important, my testimony focuses only on the impact of i*****l i*********n on public coffers. The ongoing border crisis and the dramatic increase in the i*****l i*******t population in the last three years will come at a significant cost to taxpayers. By consuming scarce public resources also will make it more difficult to assist low-income legal immigrants and U.S.-born Americans. In my testimony, I will address five major issues that relate to i*****l i*********n’s impact on taxpayers. First, I will discuss what the ongoing border crisis means for the growth in the size of the i*****l i*******t population. Second, I will touch on the enormous strain this influx is creating in many American cities. Third, I will report the estimated education level of i*****l i*******ts and then use this information to estimate the lifetime net fiscal impact — all taxes paid minus all benefits received — of the average i*****l i*******t. Fourth, I will then report some of the costs i*****l i*********n creates for key public services. Fifth, I will estimate the tax contributions of i*****l i*******ts from federal income, Social Security, and Medicaid taxes, which are by far the most important taxes that they pay. Finally, I will warn against conflating GDP growth with fiscal impact. The Current Surge Border Encounters and Aliens Released. From January 2021 to November 2023 there were nearly 8 million “encounters” at all U.S. borders.1 There has never been this many encounters over such a short period of time, which in the past were referred to as “apprehensions,” though there are some differences between the two terms. Court records and other information on the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) websites indicate that about 2.7 million inadmissible aliens have been released into the country since the start of the Biden administration.2 The decision to release these aliens represents new additions to the i*****l i*******t population. Many of those released have pending asylum applications or are parolees, but they are still i*****l i*******ts because they have not been formally admitted to the U.S. and are subject to deportation under the Immigration and Nationality Act. Got-Aways. In addition to those released into the interior of the country, there are so-called “got-aways, which according to DHS are “the number of subjects who, after making an unlawful entry, are not turned back or apprehended”. Prior to C****-**, the number averaged about 128,000, and was roughly 137,000 in 2020. In 2021, the number more than doubled to 391,000.3 DHS has not published any newer numbers. However, Fox News has reported that there were 599,000 got-aways in FY 2022.4 Further, at a May press conference, Secretary Mayorkas seemed to confirm a reporter’s question that there had already been more than 530,000 got-aways in FY 2023 at that time.5 All told, there have been roughly 1.5 million got-aways since the president took office.6 On an annual basis, the number of got-aways in FY 2022 and 2023 is 4.5 times the average in the Trump administration’s first three years before C****-**, when immigration temporarily plummeted. Visa Overstays. A significant number of new i*****l i*******ts, and perhaps a majority before the current border surge, were admitted legally on a temporary visa or under the visa waiver program and then did not leave the country when the time limit expired. DHS for FY 2022 showed 850,000 foreign visitors overstayed in that year. The total overstay rate for 2022 was 3.67 percent, which is more than double the rate of recent years. Of course, not all of these individuals stay long term, and there is always some number of people who leave the country but whose departure was not properly recorded.7 Still, the current level of overstays is much higher than in 2021 and in the years before C****-**.8 What the Monthly Census Data Shows. The largest Census Bureau survey that captures the foreign-born population is the American Community Survey (ACS), which is released annually and reflects the population in July of each year. The most recent ACS available is for 2022, so it is a year and a half out of date. This means it only partly captures the current surge in i*****l i*********n. However, the monthly Current Population Survey (CPS), which the Census Bureau collects for the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is released shortly after it is collected each month. It therefore provides the most up-to-date data available, though it is smaller than the ACS. Estimating the Illegal Population in 2023. In a recent report for the Center for Immigration Studies my colleague Karen Zeigler analyzed the CPS and found that there were 49.5 million immigrants (legal and illegal together) in the country in October of 2023, up from 45 million in January of 2021. This increase is unprecedented.9 In September, I testified before the House Education and Workforce Committee that we preliminarily estimated that the illegal population grew from 10.2 million in January 2021 to 12.6 million by May 2023. These figures are based on the monthly CPS, but are adjusted for those missed by the survey. Unfortunately, not all of the administrative data on legal immigration is available to properly estimate i*****l i*********n through October 2023. But given the ongoing border crisis we have no reason to believe that things have changed significantly since May. If that is correct, then about 2.5 million of the 4.5 million increase in the foreign-born in the CPS from January 2021 to October 2023 is due to i*****l i*********n, before adjusting for undercount. Adjusted for undercount, the illegal population has likely grown to 12.8 million in October of this year, up from 2.6 million from 10.2 million in January 2021 when the president took office. Critically, all of these numbers represent a net increase. The number of new arrivals is larger but is always offset by outmigration (including deportations), natural mortality, and in the specific case of i*****l i*******ts, legalizations (e.g., successful asylum applicants and marriage to an American). It should also be noted that our January 2021 estimate of 10.2 million represented a low point after C***d. In 2019, we estimate the illegal population was 11.5 million. So relative to the number before C***d, the current total and growth is large but not dramatically so. Finally, it must be emphasized that our new estimates are all still only preliminary.10 The Fiscal Impact of I*****l I*********n Unfortunately, there has not been enough time to estimate all the fiscal effects of the recent influx. But based on statements and publicly available information we know that many jurisdictions in the U.S. are struggling with the cost of providing services to new i*****l i*******ts. Cost for New York City. At a town hall meeting in September last year, Mayor Eric Adams stated that the huge influx of i*****l i*******ts “will destroy New York City” due to the costs the city is incurring to provide for them.11 The city expects to spend $12 billion over the next three years on housing, food, health care and other services for recently arrived i*****l i*******ts.12 In order to come up with the money to cover these new costs, the city plans to cut the budget by 5 percent across a range of services, including sanitation, public education, and the police department. 13 Obviously, the fiscal drain from i*****l i*********n must ultimately result in either fewer services or higher taxes for American citizens. Cost Outside of New York. The estimated cost of accommodating recently arrived i*****l i*******ts in Chicago in 2023 alone will be $361 million. 14 By the end of FY 2023, the District of Columbia expected to have spent $36.4 million on various services for i*****l i*******ts. 15 Denver mayor Mike Johnston recently told city councilmembers that the city will likely spend $180 million on the illegal influx in the coming year – more than triple what it spends on the homeless.16 A report from the state of Massachusetts in December of last year shows that the state expects to spend $2 billion in the next two years fundings its emergency shelter system, with i*****l i*******ts accounting for half of those needing services. 17 Other localities such as El Paso, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia are all struggling to provide services to newly-arrived i*****l i*******ts. The Education Level of I*****l I*******ts. Educational attainment is a key factor when considering i*****l i*******ts’ effect on public coffers because it determines what type of jobs they typically do and their resulting income. Income matters enormously because it affects both tax payments and eligibility for means-test government programs. Averaging estimates from the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) and the Center for Migration Studies (CMS) indicates that 43 percent of i*****l i*******ts have less than a high school diploma, 25 percent have only a high school education, 13 percent have some college, and 18 percent have at least a bachelor’s.18 Based on the citizenship of individuals encountered at the border and Census Bureau data from 2023, the new i*****l i*******ts now settling in the U.S. as a result of the current border crisis also likely have similarly modest levels of education, though we cannot say this for certain. 19 The Challenge of Estimating Fiscal Effects. Calculating the current fiscal impact of immigration requires numerous decisions about how to allocate various costs. Even more challenging are long-term fiscal estimates, which require making assumptions about the s