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.