Is Trump a Nazi monster for separating illegal alien children and parents?

Obama deliberately encouraged an influx of illegal alien children as a means of circumventing immigration law. Trump is merely reinstating the rule of law.

Immigration Illegal Alien Children
Children detained under Barack Obama, 2014 (Credit: Breitbart Texas)

I should have known that the weekend would explode into talk about Trump’s policies towards illegal aliens when I had an . . . ahem . . . “interesting” conversation with a very Proggie neighbor on Thursday at an end-of-the-school-year get together. He opened by telling me that “Your president Trump is destroying my business.”

“Well, hello to you too, neighbor.”

Here’s the story: This guy has for years been running a network of odd job people who do everything from power-washing decks to detailing cars to gardening. He relies primarily on illegal aliens to do this work. I have nothing personal against his team. He’s been working with many of them for years, and I’m sure they’re hardworking, solid people who simply want to give their families a better chance. Nevertheless, they are here illegally — and, importantly, my neighbor’s entire business model is dependent on their illegality.

Because of labor shortages in Marin (housing is too expensive for blue-collar and day labor people), he still has to pay these guys almost twice minimum wage. Nevertheless, I’m guessing that he doesn’t bother with things like employment taxes, benefits, etc. I don’t know for sure, but let’s just say that I have my suspicions.

When the neighbor greeted me by saying that Trump is destroying his business, the first thing I wanted to say was, “If your business is built on illegality, you must have known from the beginning that there was a chance law enforcement would catch up with you or at least force a change in your business model.” Indeed, as I see it, he’s quite lucky because his business is so diffuse that he hasn’t been on the receiving end of an ICE raid. His problem is that it appears that some of his employees have decided to self-deport — which is what one can predict will happen if our existing laws are actually enforced.

However, because this was a party, I wasn’t going to match my neighbor’s rudeness with my own. Instead, I just told him, “Trump’s enforcing the laws as written. If you don’t like the laws, get them changed. Obama had two years during which he could have changed the laws to grant amnesty and increase the number of Latin American immigrants . . . but he didn’t, so please don’t come crying to me.”

After a few more pointless ad hominem attacks on Trump, which I ignored, my excitable neighbor drifted away. I was no fun.

That confrontation, though, primed me for what happened over the weekend, which was the complete explosion of the “Trump is a Nazi for putting children in cages” meme led by (of course) a former CIA head (because we’re learning that many are crazy, anti-American, Deep State sociopaths):

Hayden is an ignorant man. A really, really ignorant man, not to mention intellectually shallow and manifestly stupid. Here’s what happened with the Nazis:

Starting in the 1930s, the Nazis starting enacting laws based, not on conduct, but on race. They declared that German citizens, people whose families had often been in Germany for centuries, were illegal simply by virtue of being Jewish. Then, for having committed the crime of just being, the Nazis hunted down these German Jewish citizens, stripped them of their possessions, tossed them into sadistically run, slave-labor concentration camps (splitting parents from children), and then killed as many of them as possible, both parents and children.

Beginning in 1939, the Nazis exported this practice. They violently invaded other countries and, once in power, declared that anyone who was Jewish was an illegal being simply by virtue of being Jewish. Then, for having committed the crime of just being, the Nazis hunted down Jews, stripped them of their possessions, tossed them into sadistically run, slave-labor concentration camps (splitting parents from children), and then killed as many of them as possible, both parents and children.

That’s the Nazis. What’s happening here, in Trump’s United States?

We have borders. We also have laws saying that it is illegal to cross into the United States over those borders without prior permission. Two segments of America hate those laws: the Proggies, who want as many votes as possible, giving them an incentive to bring in people whose votes can be bought. They also need bodies for census purposes. In the Leftist states to which the illegal aliens flock, counting those bodies in the census allows for more Leftist representatives in the House. That’s why Leftists are hysterical that Trump wants to exclude illegal aliens from the 2020 census. California, for example, isn’t quite so populous when you don’t count the almost 3,000,000 illegal aliens living in the state. And of course, as part of all the intersectional, white-male-hating Leftist craziness, Proggies simply want to drown out whites.

The other group that hates our immigration laws is the Chamber of Commerce cohort, to the extent it is composed of people desperate for cheap labor. The cheapest labor, as my neighbor knows, is to pay illegal immigrants under the table, while avoiding all the other required payments for legal employees, such as social security matching, unemployment, disability, taxes, etc. The next cheapest labor is to pay immigrants legitimately, but paying only minimum wage, because illegals are not always in a position to demand more. Were the illegals not around, these businesses would have to pay more to American-born laborers, including the blacks and American-born Hispanics against him the illegals compete.

President Dubya Bush was a Chamber of Commerce Republican. That explains (a) his lax border policies and (b) the fact that his wife put her name to a ghost-written opinion piece in the WaPo excoriating Trump for actually enforcing America’s immigration laws. (The other reason she did so is that the Bush clan is pure #NeverTrump. Their hatred is such that, just like McCain or Bill Kristol, they’d rather support hard Left, America-destroying policies than give Trump even a scintilla of approval for his constitutional, pro-America agenda.)

Keep in mind that these laws as written (and when enforced as written) do not criminalize mere existence based upon race, religion, sexual orientation, etc. They do not threaten people here legally with imprisonment, torture, and death because of mere existence. They do not call for America to invade other nations and then to round up people whose existence offends America, in order to imprison, torture, and kill them. Instead, these laws say “There’s a process to come into this country. If you violate the process, there are consequences, the most obvious of which is that you have to go back to your home country. And we’re sorry if your home country is poor, but the American government owes its first duty to ensuring that your illegal presence in our country does not further impoverish or kill our citizens.” Examples of the latter are Katie Steinle, shot dead by an illegal alien; 14-year-old Justin Lee, run over by a hit-and-run illegal alien; and Kayla Cuevas, tortured and killed by MS-13 gang members, most of whom came here in 2014, when Obama illegally opened America’s border wide to “children” (that is, anyone without wrinkles and gray hair).

During the Obama administration, the law went out the window. Obama, despite tough talk on immigration before he won the presidency, subscribed to the most lax policies possible when it came to enforcing immigration laws and stopping people from breaching our borders. Catch and release were the norm. Things escalated when he opened the border to unaccompanied children in 2014. His administration kept the children (many of them mere infants and others MS-13 gang members, as I noted above) in appalling conditions, something that did not see Proggies suddenly explode with Nazi analogies:

There are even more photos, which you can see here. Obama truly treated those children like cattle, which is appropriate, because Proggies never saw them as children. Instead, they were political pawns, meant to be the thin edge of the wedge for opening the border entirely. It’s worth pointing out here that past illegal aliens were mostly adults looking for work, with those who had children sending the money back home to the parents or grandparents who looked after the kids. ICE therefore was not set up either to house families together (which is extremely costly on a large scale) or to house children in age-appropriate environments. But again, when it was Obama, the Left didn’t really care.

In addition to his open border policy, Obama took a stance that created a huge incentive for the adult labors to make their illegal border crossings with children in two. The U.S.’s official asylum policy is that, when someone seeks asylum and is separated from his/her children, the government has to review the asylum request in 20 days. If it cannot do so, it must reunite and release the parent and child. By delaying the asylum hearings, Obama was able to reunite almost all illegal alien adults and children after 20 days and then release them into America, armed with a warning that they had to respond to a notice about their upcoming asylum hearing. Few responded.

An asylum request also must conform to a specific, and safe, process — safe, that is, if you’re genuinely seeking asylum based upon persecution due to race, religion, sexual identity, etc. Poverty is not a basis for asylum. Secretary Nielsen explains the process:

The asylum process does not include breaking into America illegally and then, when caught, announcing “But I’m seeking asylum.” That’s about as believable as coming upon a burglar in your house, his hands filled with your jewelry, who says, “I had an upset stomach and was just looking for a bathroom.”

Obama’s affirmative decisions to violate American immigration law did two things: They gave actual families with children an incentive to enter the U.S. illegally. I don’t blame those families who acted upon that incentive. America is a better place for their children and Obama promised them that they could violate the law without consequence. Why wouldn’t you try to come illegally to America with your children if there was a net positive to doing so? The other thing the policies did was to create an incentive for bad actors to use children that were not their own as props, in order to enter the country. Indeed, it wasn’t only the illegal aliens themselves, but also the Obama administration that trafficked children:

The United States government placed an unknown number of Central American migrant children into the custody of human traffickers after neglecting to run the most basic checks on these so-called “caregivers,” according to a Senate reportreleased on Thursday.

In the fall of 2013, tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors traveled to the U.S. southern border, in flight from poverty and gang violence in Central America. At least six of those children were eventually resettled on an egg farm in Marion, Ohio, where their sponsors forced them to work 12 hours a day under threats of death. Local law enforcement uncovered the operation last year, prompting the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations to open an inquiry into the federal government’s handling of migrants.

It is intolerable that human trafficking — modern-day slavery — could occur in our own backyard,” Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio and the chairman of the subcommittee, told the New York Times. “But what makes the Marion cases even more alarming is that a U.S. government agency was responsible for delivering some of the victims into the hands of their abusers.”

Kudos for New York Magazine to have done the above reporting. Most outlets did not.

Going back to the burglar analogy, let’s think about what Obama did:

Think of yourself in a nice little town that has a law making it a criminal act to break into someone else’s house, either to occupy it or to steal from the home owner. Of course, the town will have bad actors who violate the law. In a rule of law society, which this town is, those bad actors will be punished in accordance with the law. Their punishment will not only give them a negative consequence for their anti-social acts, it will also serve as a reminder to town citizens less inclined to crime that breaking and entering isn’t worth it.

However, imagine there’s a new mayor in town, and he makes this announcement: “If you are caught breaking and entering a house, but have your children with you, we will consider the children a mitigating circumstance and automatically release you and your children without a trial or any consequences.”

At this point, it’s going to be open season on the nice houses in town. People who ordinarily would not commit burglary, not because they have a principled opposition to burglary, but simply because they are averse to the consequences will have a green light to burglarize homes provided that they have a child in tow, whether their own child or someone else’s.

Even principled people may rethink their principles. Perhaps they’re living in a shabby part of town, which could be fixed up, but will take a lot of effort. The new mayor’s policy essentially extends to them an invitation to help themselves to whatever goods wealthier people have in their houses. (And please note that, if you’re living in a shabby part of town, everyone is wealthier than you, making all of them a target for this officially approved “burglary with children” policy.) It’s therefore reasonable for these people to act on this new opportunity, especially because they can console their consciences by saying, “If I have my kids with me, it’s no longer a crime.”

Within a very short time, normative thinking in the town becomes “Burglary is a profitable, no-risk activity provided that you bring kids (whether your own or someone else’s).” That’s the prevailing paradigm and rational people will respond to that incentive.

Eventually, though, the people who are getting burgled kick out the mayor and elect a new one who promises to stop burglary in its tracks. He carefully studies the situation and realizes that the law is not only not being enforced, but that the old mayor essentially rewrote the law to encourage burglary. The first thing he does, therefore, is to enforce the law as written.

Of course, paradigms don’t shift overnight. It’s hard for those people who relied on the old anarchy to have to deal with a return to law and order. Those people who blithely burgled houses with children in tow are, to their dismay, finding themselves arrested. Moreover, they’re being parted from the children, which is a heartache for a real parent, and a trauma for any child. In addition to that separation, the burglars are finding themselves sent to jail (a long separation from their children) or simply being returned to their shabby section of town, along with the suggestion that, rather than stealing what others have, they might take it upon themselves to improve their own community. Like my neighbor, when his business model failed, they are upset that a law they blatantly violated is suddenly being enforced to their detriment.

After a few weeks of enforcing the law as written, though, burglaries go down. They don’t go away entirely, because there will always be bad actors. However, those who were willing to burgle only to the extent that there were no consequences, will modify their behavior. Consequences are a disincentive.

The cuckoo in the tow’s nest, of course, is the screaming Leftists who analogize enforcing the town’s law as written to Naziism (a law they helped draft decades ago) and call the mayor Hitler. They’re not interested in the rule of law. They’re not interested in protecting children. They don’t care that the children on the new mayor’s watch (unlike the old mayor’s) are housed in safe, clean facilities — often better, indeed, than the homes that criminally acting parents invaded. They care only that they hate the new mayor and that they preferred a situation in which children were cruelly used so as to destroy the thriving part of that little community.

Do I need to say that my little analogy applies perfectly to the situation at our Southern border? Trump is shifting the paradigm, using behavioral training to stop the influx of people sneaking into the country and then, when caught, saying “I’ve got a child and I want asylum.” If Trump can withstand the pressure from the Left, that behavioral training will take hold very quickly.

While I’ve got your attention, let me repeat something I wrote in an earlier post about the foul opportunism and outright racism that characterizes the Left’s obsession with open borders:

I’m going to accept the Progressive argument at face value:  it’s horribly unfair that people south of the Border live in countries rife with crime, sexual violence, drugs and poverty, when we have this perfectly nice, clean, relatively safe country just hovering north of them as a perpetual enticement.  And if you buy that it’s all our fault that they suffer so terribly down there, it’s even more unfair.

The easy answer, the answer the Progressive’s espouse, is simply to open the borders and let some of the tired, poor, huddled masses from down south pour in.  Not only will they get to live in a nicer place (if you think urban slums and crime ridden border towns are nicer), but we Americans will be forced to pay a perpetual penance in the form of fewer jobs for legal citizens, higher taxes to cover welfare for illegals, and increased crime rates everywhere illegals are.  We deserve to be punished, right?

What the Progressive’s refuse to recognize is that their cute little game of allow a continuous trickle of illegal aliens over the border is a cop-out.  No matter how many come in here, there are still a much larger number abandoned way back there.  And what’s even worse is that, by allowing utterly corrupt governments (Mexico comes to mind) to have this safety valve, we are giving those governments carte blanche to continue in their reckless, corrupt, abusive ways.  As long as we siphon off the poorest and, sometimes, the most criminal citizens, the same governments that are grossly abusing their citizens continue to get a free pass.

If Progressives actually wanted to make a change South of the Border, they’d close our border and start putting really serious pressure on Latin American countries to start engaging in true reform.  The Mexican government, denied a safety valve (plus the billions of dollars the illegals send home to float the Mexican economy), would have to reform or, probably, collapse.  Clearing out that rot, allow room for true reform and real Democratic impulses, would be the true gift we, as Americans, could give people South of the Border.

Right now, all that the shrill, abusive Progressive rhetoric is doing is propping up tyrants, demagogues, criminals and incompetents.  That the Progressives’ goal is to punish Americans, not to aid Latin American, is made manifest by the fact that they aggressively refuse to help the greater number of Hispanics repair the situation at home, choosing instead to abuse their own country by putting small percentages of Hispanics in ghettos in America, all the while implicitly and explicitly supporting the same horrible regimes that sent these people fleeing in the first place.

I’ll wrap up with Trump’s most recent promise to the American people:

Yeah! What he said.