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.

Triumph

It's over.

They threw everything they had at him. They mobilized the entire vast apparatus of the evil establishment for their shameful, lying campaign to take down a good man, a mild-mannered Catholic of impeccable reputation, and they failed. The effort backfired on the Democrats, hideously and spectacularly.

The disgusting and cynical attack on Kavanaugh will not be forgotten. If you come at the king, you best not miss. The Democrats missed, and they will pay the price in the midterms. And they will continue to pay the price in the form of awakened Republican anger, and a newly radicalized Kavanaugh who will, we can hope, exact his revenge from the bench of the highest court in the land.

 

Conservatives are beginning to discover what it means to win. It is an unfamiliar feeling for people on the political Right. We are so used to noble defeat and Pyrrhic victories, to endless, shameless betrayal by the Republican establishment. Fine rhetoric about muh Constitution and muh principles, and perhaps the occasional tax cut and pointless foreign war, while the greatest nation in the history of the world morphs into a continent-sized freak show. "Winning" meant George W Bush in the Oval Office. Now, for the first time in 30 years, under the magnificent God-Emperor, we are starting to win by ACTUALLY FUCKING WINNING.

Make no mistake, this is a landmark victory. We now have possibly the most conservative Supreme Court since 1934; this is real power. The Left is in disarray, but it is also dangerous, like a wounded animal that is still far from dead. Having failed to defeat Kavanaugh through the normal political process, and having failed to ruin his life through their despicable lies and machinations, the Left will now extend and widen the battle to the legitimacy of the Supreme Court itself. They are already laying the groundwork for this next phase of the conflict. "Kavanaugh’s confirmation will have poisoned the foundation of the judiciary’s authority." If they cannot keep the court, they will burn it down.

There is literally no institution, no custom, no tradition, no bedrock American value the Left will not eagerly demolish in its insane, totalizing quest for utopia. Do I exaggerate? Forget limited government, forget guns and border enforcement...  now they're attacking the freakin' presumption of innocence!!!

Mike Cernovich made the astute point that the establishment media has lost any remaining credibility through this fiasco. Even the formerly admired Ronan Farrow has completely jumped the shark, penning not one, but two ludicrous hit pieces against Kavanaugh in The New Yorker. Why would anyone even bother to refute a hit piece anymore? The media is totally, utterly fake and everyone knows it. If you're ever accused of something by the media, all you have to do is say "fake news" and you've won the argument.

But the damage runs deeper than that. As @Instapundit noted, "Trump's greatest gift is getting various institutions to make clear in obvious ways that they're as corrupt as he says they are." This was in reference to the story that hundreds -- ultimately more than 2,400 -- law professors had signed a letter arguing that Kavanaugh should not be confirmed based on his judicial temperament. As if the righteous fury of a good man falsely accused, when defending himself before the Senate and the nation in the capacity of a witness, has any bearing whatsoever on his temperament as a judge! And then there is the contemptible bias displayed by the ACLU and the American Bar Association.

The Democratic party. The media. The legal profession. All severely damaged, if not comprehensively discredited, in a matter of weeks.

The Right has won a huge victory, but there are many more battles to come. The Left will grow crazier, more desperate and more violent as their world continues to fall apart. Our political system will devolve into chaos and our institutions will continue to bleed legitimacy. There is little doubt that the United States is on a greased slope to collapse, but we need to keep winning or what replaces the US will be worse than we can imagine.