Chris Powell: Trump's border wall beats Conn. AG's demagogic posturing

President Trump looking at new border wall prototypes in San Diego, in March 2018.

Connecticut Atty. Gen. William Tong has joined a lawsuit with 15 other states against President Trump's declaration of a federal emergency, which the president plans to use to justify spending otherwise-appropriated money to complete a wall across the Mexican border. Tong says that he aims to protect the U.S. Constitution and the state, but, accusing the president of "racism and hate," he is engaging mainly in the demagogic posturing that characterized his recent campaign.

Tong notes that Congress has refused to authorize spending for the wall and that diverting funds to build it could hamper federal projects in Connecticut. Further, the attorney general and other Democratic officials in Connecticut and nationally argue that illegal immigration is not really an emergency.

But federal law authorizes such money transfers upon an emergency declaration and leaves the president to define emergencies. So even legal analysts who disdain Trump expect the lawsuit against the declaration to fail at the Supreme Court.

Besides, those who object to Trump's emergency declaration long have gotten far too comfortable with illegal immigration.

Illegal immigration was supposed to have been stopped by the Simpson-Mazzoli Act of 1986, which bestowed a grand amnesty on illegal immigrants in exchange for more border security, but the border security never materialized. So today the foreign-born proportion of the U.S. population is higher than ever; the country's illegal population is estimated at 11 million; most illegals intercepted at the border enjoy the government's hapless practice of "catch and release"; most of those released never appear for court proceedings, instead disappearing into the ever-growing communities of illegals throughout the country, like New Haven, one of the first "sanctuary cities"; and there is less assimilation and more separatism by immigrants.

While Tong postures against "racism and hate," his party's legislators in the General Assembly are advancing legislation to require medical insurers to sell policies to illegal immigrants, which will be more facilitation of illegal immigration and more nullification of federal law on top of the driver's licenses and tuition discounts Connecticut already offers illegals.

Yes, there may be better measures than a wall for stopping illegal immigration -- like requiring all employers to use the "e-Verify" system of confirming eligibility for employment, and imposing serious penalties on employers of illegals.

But most Democrats oppose such measures and anything that might substantially reduce illegal immigration. And while Democrats in Congress complain about the cost of Trump's wall, every month they happily sneeze away far more money on the futile 18-year military adventure in Afghanistan. Trump's wall won't be perfectly effective, but it will be far more effective and humane than what the Democrats condone in Afghanistan.

Despite the attorney general's demagoguery, there is nothing racist or hateful in controlling immigration so the country knows what it is getting -- whether it is getting people of decent character and skills, people who want to live in a democratic and secular society rather than a totalitarian and theocratic one, people who want to become Americans and help build the country, or people who just want to undercut wages in menial work and wire the money back across the border or exploit the country's generous welfare system.

So even if illegal immigration isn't an emergency, at least Trump sees it as a problem. His wall beats the Democrats' nullification.


Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Chris Powell: New Haven's mayor has been very busy helping to erase America's borders

New Haven from the air.

President Trump can be counted on to discredit even a legitimate issue, as he did last week at a White House meeting by joking about the absence of New Haven Mayor Toni Harp, whom he had summoned to praise, along with other mayors, for their work on transportation issues.

“Toni Harp. Where's Toni? Toni? Toni?," Trump said, adding, "Uh, can't be a sanctuary city person. That's not possible, is it?”

Of course, Harp is the mayor of the most brazen sanctuary city in the country and, having learned a few hours earlier of the Trump administration's new demand for immigration policy information from other such cities, she seems to have suspected, rightly, that, to score political points, the president might change the meeting's subject from transportation to immigration. So Harp skipped the meeting.

Whereupon the president blustered, "The mayors who chose to boycott this event have put the needs of criminal illegal immigrants over law-abiding America."

Of course the immigration issue is not that simple. Yes, some illegal immigrants are criminals but most are not. The real issue is whether immigration is ever to be controlled and, if so, how.

So it might have been helpful if Harp had attended the meeting and had replied to any demagoguery from the president.

But just as Trump demagogues the immigration issue by overstating its criminal aspects, Harp and other proponents of sanctuary cities and states -- like the mayor nearly all of them Democrats, including Connecticut Gov. Dannel  Malloy -- claim to find virtue in nullifying federal law as the old segregationists did. It is actually the position of the nullifiers that anyone who breaks into the United States and makes his way to New Haven should be exempt from immigration law.

The president's demagoguery has made it nearly impossible to have an intelligent and civilized debate on the immigration issue. But his opponents are fortunate about this, since they don't want such a debate. They would lose it. For the logic of their position is that the United States shouldn't even be a country.

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Connecticut's latest sad deportation case is that of Joel Colindres, an illegal immigrant living in New Fairfield with a U.S. citizen wife and two young U.S. citizen children. He says he came to the United States from Guatemala in 2004 to escape violence and persecution, surrendered to immigration authorities in Texas, and got regular stays of deportation until recently. Now the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency may expel him in a few days.

Presumably Colindres enjoyed the infamous "catch and release" policy of previous administrations, whereby, rather than being sent back immediately, illegal immigrants were given years to stay in the country, marry and start families to use as hostages against deportation by future administrations if their overused claims of fleeing persecution were ever doubted. Indeed, most illegal immigrants from Latin America are really only economic refugees, not political ones.

While it may be hard to see the point of deporting an illegal immigrant who has a citizen wife and children, there is one. It is to frighten and deter other illegal immigrants and induce their Democratic supporters to accept the obvious political compromise -- another immigration amnesty like the Simpson-Mazzoli Act of 1986, which promised but never delivered border security, in exchange for another such promise, this time the president's border wall. But erasing the border remains more important to the Democrats than legalizing the illegals and preserving families.


Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

After some decades of steep decline, parts of New Haven have become much more prosperous, and, well, gentrified, in the past couple of decades, including this stretch of upper State Street.