George Rebane
Intrepid leftwing columnist at The Union, George Boardman, is either trying to bamboozle the lightly-read reader, or was just a bit fast and loose on the keyboard in his 7jan19 submittal to the newspaper. In his commentary ‘Don’t Expect Reality to Intrude on Trump’s Argument for a Border Wall’, Mr Boardman launches into a sonorous if not somnambulant recounting of the debate about how to secure our southern border. He repeats the new shibboleths about whether it should really be a solid concrete wall or some other form of possible physical barrier “to cut-off the hordes of illegal immigrants poring(sic) across the border to take good-paying American jobs, commit numerous crimes, and turn our fair country into an outpost of lawlessness.” Well, he almost got that list right – nobody is worried about our country becoming “an outpost of lawlessness”, just illegals committing the reported numerous crimes and costing a bundle to hunt and house them in our prisons.
But his main argument for ignoring the tens of thousands pouring across our southern border is that they don’t number as many as those who enter the US legally with visas and then overstay. Boardman quotes the legal entrant overstays for 2016 at 628,799, while the illegal entrants in 2016 number only 170,000. Countering this, the US Customs and Border Protection arm of the Dept of Homeland Security post the more realistic 553,378 who were apprehended in 2016 (more here). The number escaping apprehension is unknown, but reasonable estimates place it in the same range as the apprehensions. And with the advent of the recent mass migrations, this number has increased significantly based on 102,857 apprehensions last year (2018) reported during October and November – the annualized number for this comes to over 600,000. Again, we don’t know all of those illegals who got through our overwhelmed border security personnel. The illegals who overstayed their visas in 2017 number 702,000 according to the DHS. And yes, about half of the illegal aliens in the country today entered legally and overstayed their visas.
From his version of such statistics Mr Boardman concludes with the simple red herring that “If you really want to stop illegal immigration, a wall is not the solution.” Nobody has maintained that any southern border barrier will stop all illegal aliens from settling in America. But can his readers see through this little bit of legerdemain? Nor does our columnist tell us that those entering legally with visas and those crawling through border barriers comprise two distinct cohorts of illegals. Our immigration and border security people were able to vet those to whom we issued visas. We know that they weren’t the obvious drug runners, human traffickers, unaccompanied minors, wanted criminals, terrorists, … . Those coming in across the southern border (sometimes multiple times) do not submit to such examination, and there are enough of them to be of concern to reasonable law-abiding Americans who are not racists, xenophobes, or even nationalists. (more here)
After having convinced his readers that our porous southern border is not a concern, he does a subtle shift to put a cherry on that argument by citing all the benefits to the American economy and workforce contributed by immigrants who make up more than one sixth of our workforce and almost three fourths of our tech workers, many of whom are entrepreneurs starting new companies that grow our economy and maintain our leadership in the world of innovation and commerce. (I also belong to that cohort.) Well yes, but all of these people came in legally and are not the under-educated poor illegal entrants from, well, you know, what our fearless leader correctly called "shithole countries". That subtle semantical pirouette of naming all foreign-born in America as ‘immigrants’, regardless of their mode of entry and legal status, continues to support the bamboozle our Left is successfully dispensing in today’s media. Everyone is an immigrant, and since we are a nation of immigrants, therefore we must let all immigrants enter and succor their needs. To do otherwise is heartless and un-American, capice? (more here and here)
But in the final analysis Mr Boardman is a loyal liberal just soldiering on, polishing the progressive narrative to make it more palatable to the residents of these hinterlands. (Just to be clear, I too am guilty of doing my part to purvey the conservetarian worldview, hopefully with better numbers and reasoning.)
PS. Just to pile on, in this scurrilous piece of journalism, Mr Boardman also throws in some red meat for the alt-Left: Because in its op-ed the WSJ deigned to propose a solution to the government shutdown negotiations, our columnist asks, "Who said the fake news media doesn't have any clout in this country?" (emphasis mine)
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