The invisible wall

This is how it's done. Walls are great, yes – and the US needs a wall. Equally important, America needs to make it harder to immigrate across the board. A Politico report from last September details how Lee Francis Cissna, head of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, is tightening up the system:

• Creation of a “denaturalization task force” to strip away fraudulently obtained citizenship
• Allowing visa officers to deny applications without first requesting more info
• Refugee admissions slashed
• Proposed legislation to prevent immigrants from obtaining green cards if they or their family members have used a public benefit
• Suspension of a fast-track processing program for H-1B visas
• Planned rollback of work authorization for spouses of H-1B visa holders

Horrors!

The man overseeing these reforms isn’t Stephen Miller, the White House aide publicly known as the architect of President Donald Trump’s most restrictionist immigration policies. It’s Lee Francis Cissna, the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, an agency that not only facilitates legal immigration, but historically celebrates it. Miller is rightly seen as the mastermind of Trump’s far-reaching immigration crackdown, but Cissna is arguably just as important because he makes it happen.

Much less visible than Miller or Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, Cissna has quietly carried out Trump’s policies with a workmanlike dedication. From his perch atop USCIS, he’s issued a steady stream of policy changes and regulations that have transformed his agency into more of an enforcement body and less of a service provider. These changes have generated blowback from immigrant advocates, businesses and even some of his own employees. Leon Rodriguez, who served as USCIS director under President Barack Obama, said the agency is sending a message “that this is a less welcoming environment than it may have been before.” […]

While the travel ban and family separations grabbed headlines, Cissna has waged a quieter war, tightening and reworking regulations and guidance that make it harder to come to the U.S. as an immigrant or temporary worker.

Cissna, one gets the impression, sees himself as a technocratic civil servant who is faithfully upholding the law and the administration's policies, rather than some kind of anti-immigration zealot. It's funny how the people interviewed by Politico seem unable to square Cissna's immigrant parentage with his tough bureaucratic actions, as if they cannot imagine a government official “of color” choosing loyalty to America over his own perceived ethnic self-interest. There's also a weird line about how being Catholic is supposedly incompatible with “splitting up families at the border,” i.e. separating children from illegal alien adults who may or may not be their parents

Cissna gave a good response to a popular, but retarded, immigration canard:

Cissna sees no conflict in shaping policies that could have kept his own family out of the United States if they had been implemented several decades ago. “There’s no reason why I shouldn’t be able to advocate for a policy that I think is better for the country, even if it might affect or have affected my own family personally,” he told me.

And a recent update on the Trump administration's tightening of the H-1B visa program:

Immigrants with specialized skills are being denied work visas or seeing applications get caught up in lengthy bureaucratic tangles under federal changes that some consider a contradiction to President Donald Trump’s promise of a continued pathway to the U.S. for the most talented foreigners.

Getting what’s known as an H-1B visa has never been a sure thing — the number issued annually is capped at 85,000 and applicants need to enter a lottery to even be considered. But some immigration attorneys, as well as those who hire such workers, say they’ve seen unprecedented disruptions in the approval process since Trump took office in 2017.

Spit out that black pill! Drumpf is far from perfect, but whereas his opponents (Republican and Democrat alike) are feckless traitors who piss on everything you care about, the God-Emperor is at least beginning to move things in the right direction. Let's see how he does over the next year, before the 2020 Republican presidential primaries.

Link roundup

Leading today's roundup of news and views, the eminent historian Victor Davis Hanson offers a devastating synopsis of the attempted Deep State coup against the POTUS, which he correctly characterizes as likely "the greatest scandal in American political history."

In the meantime, Trump continues to allow key positions in his administration to be occupied by people who openly loathe him and everything he claims to stand for. Is it possible, as the blogger Vox Day suggests, that Trump's increasing submission to the globalists and neocons is connected to the winding down of the fake Russia collusion investigation? It does seem odd that the God-Emperor's metamorphosis into a swaggering version of Jeb! Bush is accelerating even as the Deep State pressure on him appears to be lessening. But what do I know.

Autopsy of a Dead Coup

The newly promoted McCabe apparently felt that it was his moment to become famous for taking out a now President Trump. Thus, he assembled a FBI and DOJ cadre to open a counterintelligence investigation of the sitting president on no other grounds but the fumes of an evaporating Clinton opposition dossier and perceived anger among the FBI that their director had just been fired. In addition, apparently now posing as Andrew McCabe, MD, he informally head counted how many of Trump’s own cabinet members could be convinced by McCabe’s own apparent medical expertise to help remove the president on grounds of physical and mental incapacity under the 25th Amendment. This was an attempted, albeit pathetic, coup against an elected president and the first really in the history of the United States.

Why Trump is Losing

The success of Trump’s presidency is similarly inseparable from the construction of a wall. In addition to its practical effects, the wall has important symbolic value as a rejection of globalism and an assertion of American sovereignty. Without control of the border and immigration reform broadly, his presidency will be a failure on its own terms. While some held their nose in voting for Trump and others, like me, had a real affection for him and his style, both recognize that Trump’s chief appeal is that he is a fighter. He fought when most Republicans backed down whether against the media, North Korea, or the Deep State. During the campaign, he consistently affirmed the right of ordinary Americans to have a government responsive to them.

It now appears Trump painted himself into a corner and got played by the Machiavellian Nancy Pelosi. He tried a shutdown without much of a plan in December, but eventually relented and allowed a temporary funding measure. During the interregnum, he telegraphed his intention to use emergency powers—deviating from his own wisdom that one needs to keep such plans quiet—and, in the process, the Democrats littered the spending bill with various provisions that will defang what might have been a plausible plan to use emergency powers to fund the wall.

Why Autocrats Are Replacing Democrats

Yet Congress had the latent power, in Article III, Section 2, to restrict the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court and every other federal court. But the big stick the founders left for Congress to corral a runaway Supreme Court was never picked up, never used.

High among the reasons Trump was elected was that, for all his flaws and failings, he was seen as a doer, a man who “gets things done.”

The Naysayers Are Wrong. Bernie Sanders Is A Formidable 2020 Contender

In short, a multitude of factors culminate in the following inescapable conclusion: Bernie Sanders is the strongest 2020 Democratic candidate. Whether you’d call him the “front-runner” is immaterial. That’s kind of trite pundit terminology anyway. The bottom line is that the power and influence he garnered as a result of the previous run, during which he won 46 percent of elected delegates, is sufficient to assume that he is extremely formidable.

Good Riddance to Amazon

Conservatives are right to join with progressive populists in opposing the Amazon deal. And they shouldn’t be either cowed by the hysterics from the business community, or seduced by the chance to score a few political shots against Ocasio-Cortez, into going wobbly now. The rightist opposition to the deal, even if it meant allying with the likes of AOC, was a sign, like the Tucker Carlson monologue and the Trump election, of the growing and important rebellion of rank-and-file Republicans and conservatives against the wealthy “fiscally conservative, socially liberal” corporate and party establishment. This is no time to revert.

(The excellent Selena Zito has a different perspective on the Amazon deal that I think misses the point.)

The View From Olympus: Following the Classic Pattern

Great powers tend to follow a similar pattern of rise, a short time of dominance, overextension, and fall.  It is ever more clear that this country is following the classic pattern.  Our period of dominance ran roughly from 1945 to 1965; its end was marked by our defeat in Vietnam.  We are now in the latter stages of the phase of overextension.  Fall, I suspect, lies around the next corner.

Trump administration launches global effort to end criminalization of homosexuality

The Trump administration is launching a global campaign to end the criminalization of homosexuality in dozens of nations where it's still illegal to be gay, U.S. officials tell NBC News, a bid aimed in part at denouncing Iran over its human rights record.

U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell, the highest-profile openly gay person in the Trump administration, is leading the effort, which kicks off Tuesday evening in Berlin. The U.S. embassy is flying in LGBT activists from across Europe for a strategy dinner to plan to push for decriminalization in places that still outlaw homosexuality — mostly concentrated in the Middle East, Africa and the Caribbean.