But it’s also because they repeatedly turned questions about immigration into questions about Muslims and ISIS.
.. Megyn Kelly asked Marco Rubio about the problem of undocumented immigrants. He responded that, “I’m going to tell you exactly how we’re going to deal with it when I am president. Number one, we’re going to keep ISIS out of America.”
.. But politically, it serves a purpose. By putting ISIS at the center of their immigration rhetoric, Republican candidates make immigration seem more threatening and less ambiguous. It’s one thing to depict immigrants as people who depress wages and crowd schools. It’s another to depict them as potential killers. That utterly dehumanizes them... The answers by GOP candidates also play into a larger conservative effort to depict Mexican immigrants as, if not ISIS members, then at least dangerous. Immigrants actually commit crime at a lower rate than native-born Americans.
Friends and Refugees in Need
one in every 122 people on the planet today is “fleeing a conflict” at a time when wars between nations “are at a record low,” said Miliband, a former British foreign secretary. Why? Because we now have nearly 30 civil wars underway in weak states that are “unable to meet the basic needs of citizens or contain civil war.”
.. More and more countries are now sealing their borders, and anti-immigrant parties are rising everywhere. Sweden has imposed border controls, and its ultranationalist Sweden Democrats party has grown from the fringe to one of the largest. Many in Germany, Sweden and Austria, which have accepted the lion’s share of refugees so far, want to seal off Greece from the E.U.’s passport-free internal travel zone if Greece — the first port of entry of many refugees — is unable or unwilling to hold them.
In the past few days, The Guardian reported, national leaders and top E.U. officials warned “that Europe’s passport-free travel zone could crumble within weeks, risking the dissolution of the union.”
Stretched to the Limit: Has the German State Lost Control?
For decades, Germany has skimped on its civil service and cut budgets wherever possible. Now Berlin is paying the price. But the causes go much deeper than that, touching on the fundamental relationship between the German state and those who have recently arrived. In Germany, a 66-year-old democracy, the police have positioned themselves as “friends and helpers,” but it is a promise that young men from North Africa don’t immediately understand.
.. The consequence is that, in some places, law and order is restricted, or doesn’t exist at all. Like in Cologne on New Year’s Eve. Or in troubled city quarters in Frankfurt and Berlin during the entire year.
.. A good place to start, particularly given the dark events in Cologne, is with the police. How is it possible that the square in front of the train station could morph into a zone of lawlessness? Why was the state not present on that New Year’s Eve night? Was there a lack of police? Where they overwhelmed by the mob?
.. Krieten argues that the justice system must do the opposite. It needs to make its presence felt and engage with young men who often have a problem with self-determined women and, as a last resort, know only the kind of violence they may have learned from their own families. “Instead of perpetuating the illusion that you can just deport them all,” Krieten says, “the truth is that we must solve the problems here.”
Donald Trump and the American Id Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/422116/donald-trump-and-american-id-kevin-d-williamson
A literal Republican in Name Only, Trump holds political views that were, until the day before yesterday, up-and-down-the-line progressive: pro-abortion, pro-Kelo and supportive of other tools of crony capitalism, and, if the words of Donald J. Trump himself are to be believed, pro–amnesty for illegal immigrants, too — not for 11 million, but for the fictitious 30 million he discussed with Bill O’Reilly: You have to give them a path. You have 20 million, 30 million, nobody knows what it is. It used to be 11 million. Now, today I hear it’s 11, but I don’t think it’s 11. I actually heard you probably have 30 million. You have to give them a path, and you have to make it possible for them to succeed. You have to do that.