Chris Powell: Trump's charge about illegals voting raises a good question

Donald Trump's  assertion that he might have won the popular vote in the presidential election if so many illegal aliens had not voted against him is implausible if not ridiculous. But Connecticut is not in a good position to dismiss the complaint entirely.

For while extracting the information from the  Connecticut secretary of the state's office was nearly as difficult as pulling teeth, the (Manchester) Journal Inquirer reported the other day that Connecticut does not require any documentation of citizenship from people registering to vote. Only documentation of identity and residency are required, and it's up to municipal voter registrars to decide what sort of documentation they will accept, even whether to accept the identification cards that "sanctuary cities" like New Haven have been issuing to illegal immigrants to facilitate their violation of federal law.

New voters need only to attest under penalty of perjury that they are citizens. For Connecticut considers it too onerous to require new voters to produce a birth certificate, and there are no checks of the eligibility of applicants and no audits of the eligibility of those already registered.

Of course it's unlikely that many illegal immigrants have registered to vote in Connecticut. But since the state's illegal immigrant population already is estimated to exceed 100,000 and keeps growing thanks to the "sanctuary cities," more illegal immigrants are likely to register over time. Since illegal immigrants have no reason to vote Republican, their registering is in the interest of the Democratic administrations of the "sanctuary cities" -- not just New Haven but also Hartford and New London and, probably, soon, Bridgeport as well.

Those cities always produce big Democratic pluralities and their administrations have great incentive not to be fastidious about the citizenship requirement for voters.

Further, influential forces on both the political left and right want to perpetuate illegal immigration. The left benefits from increasing the low-skilled, low-wage population, which becomes dependent on government. The right gets cheaper labor that depresses the working-class wage base and living standards.

The other day the Hartford Courant assisted this process with an editorial advising Hartford city government how it could distribute to illegal immigrants the sort of city identification cards issued in New Haven without maintaining records that could be pursued by federal immigration authorities, even when the feds are chasing criminals or terrorists. In issuing the cards, the Courant said, the city should not keep any records of the information submitted by illegal immigrants, nor any records of the issued cards themselves.

The card-issuing process then would be beyond evaluation, even by news organizations like the Courant. Anyone could come to Hartford, obtain city identification with forged documents, and slip into the community without a trace. As New Haven has done, Hartford thus would commandeer both national immigration and national security policy.

Even citizens seeking a change of identity for criminal and debt-evasion purposes could exploit this system.

All this destruction of standards is being cloaked in political correctness and humanity, as if it is the only alternative to Gestapo-style raids and deportations of the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the country.

But the issues are separate. Ending the facilitation of illegal immigration by local nullification of immigration law does not require inflicting cruelty on anyone, and while the nullifiers complain that the immigration system is "broken," they are the ones breaking it.

If the country won't enforce any standards in voting and immigration, eventually it won't be a country anymore.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn., and an essayist on cultural and political issues.

Chris Powell: Arrogant "undocumented immigrants'' out of the shadows; fictionalizing parking for the handicapped

As they blocked Main Street in downtown Hartford by unfurling a 50-foot banner protesting deportations and an unfavorable (to them) U.S. Supreme Court decision, "undocumented immigrants" -- the politically correct term for illegal aliens -- and their supporters declared last week that they were "coming out of the shadows."

"I'm undocumented, unafraid, and here to stay," one announced through a bullhorn.

Nine protesters were charged by police with disorderly conduct.

Their disappointment was understandable but their indignation was misplaced and their presumption of a right to inconvenience and bully everyone else was contemptible. 

After all, few illegal aliens are "living in the shadows" in Connecticut. Hartford and New Haven have declared themselves "sanctuary cities," formally committed to nullifying federal immigration law, as state government itself is committed more or less, now that it is providing driver's licenses and college-tuition discounts to illegals. All Connecticut's members of Congress favor amnesty for illegals. 

Besides, "living in the shadows" is what lawbreakers do, although it's not as if any immigration-law violator is in danger of being persecuted for innocent characteristics like ethnicity, homosexuality or left-handedness. Every nation has the right to immigration law -- indeed, controlling immigration is the definition of nationhood -- and illegals have violated the law just as much as anyone else has.

Yes, the country's failure to enforce immigration law, induced by pressure from unscrupulous employers and groups that don't want any immigration-law enforcement, has contributed to the extenuating circumstances of millions of young people whose illegality was the responsibility of their parents. Politics has been obstructing legislation that might give them a "path to citizenship" -- and not just the politics of legislators hostile to immigration but also the politics of legislators hostile to achieving border control before amnesty. But that's democracy for you. Building consensus can take time.

Breaking a perfectly legitimate law and then demanding that it be changed in one's favor while one bullies innocent people on the street is pretty arrogant. Who do the illegals think they are -- Citigroup or Tribune Publishing, which undertook illegal corporate acquisitions in Connecticut, confident that they were influential enough to get the laws and regulations repealed?

If their arrogance is going to extend to blocking traffic, the illegals should go back in the shadows.

* * *

Because of legislation signed last week by Gov. Dannel Malloy, Connecticut's official emblem for reserving parking spots for the handicapped has been what the governor calls "modernized." It's more like fictionalized.

The old emblem showed a stick figure sitting in a wheelchair. The new emblem has the stick figure leaning forward in a racing pose as if engaging in a game of wheelchair basketball. The idea is to dispel the supposedly retrograde idea that the handicapped are handicapped and instead suggest that people with disabilities can lead active lives -- as if anyone thought there was some law against it.

But of course if the handicapped were not disadvantaged in some way, they would hardly need preferential parking, and most of the people whose cars are equipped with handicapped parking permits are not athletes but old folks unsteady on their feet, carrying canes, or lugging oxygen canisters.

So the new emblem is just another symptom of the political correctness plaguing Connecticut under the Malloy administration. In this respect the collapse of state government's finances is fortunate, for nothing will be spent to replace the handicapped parking signs just to get rid of the old emblem. The signs with the old emblem will be replaced only as they wear out. For the time being the PC brigades may have to settle for taking the signs off bathroom doors.

Chris Powell is a Connecticut-based columnist on politics and society and managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Trump does some truth-telling

I must admit that sometimes the great huckster Donald Trump  can do some  healthy truth-telling.  That's a major reason why he seems to be hanging on to such strong support. For instance, he has been the only GOP presidential candidate to note that all the presidential candidates are whores to various degrees to economic interest groups -- that the current system is utterly corrupt. The Koch Brothers summon the GOP candidates and give them marching orders. Hillary Clinton answers to Wall Street.

Yessir, Boss!

He also noted accurately that Canada's  popular single-payer health-insurance system (which even the current conservative regime up there does not try to dislodge) works very well -- much, much better than the U.S. joke of a mercenary and chaotic healthcare "system.''

He also reminds people that illegal aliens are, indeed, here illegally, eschewing such ridiculous euphemisms as "undocumented residents.''

-- Robert Whitcomb