Faster, please: A great pushback is awakening here and abroad, but its timing, nature, and future remain mysterious.
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media
Given European socialism, and given its therapeutic culture that assumes morality is relative and situational, it is quite stunning — especially to the Greeks — that suddenly debts are to mean not endless negotiations, haggling, blame-gaming, and contextualization, but are reduced to something akin to Calvin Coolidge’s snarky alleged quote, “They hired the money, didn’t they?”
Aside from the threats of Vladimir Putin and the wobbling of the European Union, Europe is being overrun with illegal immigrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Once an impoverished foreign national arrives at any European shore, the European Union, either out of utopian piety or colonial guilt, feels obligated to accept him, without questioning much his legal status or the reasons for his arrival — much less why it should not extend such magnanimity to tens of millions of others who may well follow.
But the cash-strapped leftwing European public, outside its privileged elite, is slowly tiring of illegal immigration as well. Apparently it has concluded that tens of millions of illegal migrants neither assimilate quickly nor are much thankful to their hosts for their sanctuary status — and that hundreds of millions more would come if they could to enjoy the European welfare state. An aging and shrinking European socialism accepts that its own redistributionist entitlements are not sustainable. But it also assumes that those arriving from the former Third World have neither the interest nor the skills to join the labor force to subsidize their hosts’ own generous retirement packages.
At home the progressive Left is on the scent of another scalp, this time Donald Trump’s for his uncouth and blunderbuss stereotyping of illegal immigrants from Mexico, who, he implies, are for the most part not Mexico’s choice citizenry and who have a tendency to commit various crimes upon arrival.
The best way to refute the shoot-from-the-hip Trump’s stereotyping of an entire illegal immigration population as inordinately committing crimes and relying on state subsidies should be easy: his critics should not quote creased-browed professors and outraged ethnic activists, but first cite federal and state statistics of crimes committed by illegal aliens as well as the legal status of those on federal and state assistance, and then calculate to what degree these percentages are not — or in fact are — in line with the native American population.
Of course, Trump’s opponents rarely do that, partly because governments, both state and federal — which love to categorize Americans by race, class, and gender — strangely claim that they do not have accurate and up-to-date statistics on illegal aliens. When the liberal PolitiFact stitches together what facts it can find to properly refute Fox pundit Gavin McInnes’s erroneous claim that 50 percent of Texas murders were committed by illegal aliens, does it then go on to correct the record with a more accurate percentage?
No. PolitiFact trumpets that 50% of Texas murders are not committed by illegal aliens. End of story? But it does not then tell us that its own data of refutation nevertheless might suggest that 17% of Texas murders may well be committed by illegal aliens — an astounding figure in its own right.
Open-borders advocates typecast every bit as much as does Trump, likewise adducing anecdote in lieu of hard data. If one listens to the exaggerations of Trump, he implies that the majority of arrivals from Mexico are criminally minded. But if one listens to La Raza Inc. or Rep. Gutierrez, illegal aliens seem to be all dreamers. The truth is that impoverished and most indigenous peoples from central Mexico and Central America are neither saints nor sinners, but as a rule arrive without legality, a high school diploma, money, or English, and by needs are quite willing to ignore immigration law both when arriving — and steadily thereafter. (The vast majority — over 80% — from last year’s border surge skipped their required subsequent immigration hearings.)
Presidential candidate Trump is supposedly enjoying a bump in the polls. How could that be, given his plutocratic hubris, his flamboyance and his often sloppy rhetoric? Again the answer is predictable. He is blunt — and uncouth; while the Left is sly and uncouth. The public sometimes prefers their exaggerations as bold and not packaged in nasal whines. We are supposed to shudder at the reaction when writer Ann Coulter, promoting a supposedly nativist book about immigration, is rushed by illegal immigration activists at a book signing. Then she confirms our stereotypes by declaring that Latin Americans typically express criticism in such a riotous fashion. The media forgets that she is matched and trumped by the activists themselves. They disrupted a peaceful book signing; they tore up books that they disagreed with (an act which has a good 20th-century fascist pedigree); some brought out Mexican flags to show solidarity with the country that they most certainly do not wish to return to. And there was a shout or two, in racist fashion, that Coulter should return to Europe — as if a guest here illegally from a foreign country has a greater claim on residence than does a U.S. citizen.
As in the case of Paula Deen [1], Duck Dynasty, and the addled Donald Sterling, the nation unleashed its thought police to destroy Trump in the fashion that has worked so well with other intemperate or biased speakers (at least those who are not of the liberal bent of politically incorrect gaffers like a Sen. Harry Reid, Vice President Joe Biden, Al Sharpton, David Letterman — or Barack Obama, who believes “typical” white people (all 220 million?) stereotype blacks while there are apparently “gangbangers” crossing illegally into the U.S. on his watch). But so far, the politically selective yanked sponsorships and corporate ostracism seem to have little effect on the self-promoting and boisterous multibillionaire Trump. Why so? Perhaps the cause is again public exhaustion with hypocrisy [2]. NBC, after all, still has on the air an inveterate prevaricator like Brian Williams [3] and a homophobe, racist, and anti-Semite like Al Sharpton [4] — after publication of their respective make-believe stories and various hate speech.
Trump seems to sense that if he is to play the role of an IED, at least there are lots of collateral liberal hypocrisies that can blow up along with his own biases. Are people then fed up with the thought police, who can go from a reasonable request not to use state subsidies and sanctions to fly the Confederate battle flag to the hysterical Trostykization of everything Confederate in popular culture and entertainment? How did we go from Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama lecturing us recently on why gay marriage was neither necessary nor appropriate to similar skepticism earning others a career-ending rebuke? Why did not the president power up the White House in 2009 or 2011 with the gay rainbow light show?
If Trump is completely unhinged, then it would be impossible last week for illegal alien Francisco Sanchez to randomly shoot apart the aorta of passerby Kathryn Steinle — out for a pleasant stroll with her father on a pier walkway in sanctuary city San Francisco. Trump, of course, in the fashion that Barack Obama routinely cites Trayvon Martin and other tragedies, used the murder as proof [5] that his generalizations are based on some fact.
And perhaps in some cases they are. Sanchez had already been deported to Mexico five times and arrested, convicted and incarcerated — and paroled — for seven prior felonies. He was out largely because he was released from custody by a San Francisco judge in accordance with the city’s “sanctuary” policy of not notifying immigration authorities when an illegal alien, ex-felon or not, is freed from jail.
None of that laxity is new to San Francisco. Recall the 2008 murder of San Francisco resident Tony Bologna and his two sons by illegal alien and paroled felon Edwin Ramos. Nor is it novel in California in general: recall last October the two Sacramento-area law enforcement officers who were murdered by twice-deported illegal alien Luis Enrique Monroy-Bracamontes.
Quite tiring it has become to be lectured about inordinate wealth and unfairness from the money-grubbing Hillary Clinton, who apparently thinks that an electrician from Sacramento or an accountant in Lansing is proof positive of structural inequity in a way her hedge-fund-profiting daughter and son-in-law, or her own $300,000, price-gauging 30-minute lectures at public universities are not. Likewise, the public of all races and classes is tired of quite wealthy liberals and elite people of color pontificating on television on the moral lapses of the supposedly racist middle classes — assured that these one-percenters are immune from the ramifications of their own ideologies. (Where do the Obama girls go to school? How did the Holder children fly on a government Gulfstream to the Belmont Stakes? How did Chelsea Clinton become a multimillionaire? Where do network hosts live and how much do they make? When did Al Sharpton settle his back taxes with the IRS?).
Millions of Americans do not feel necessarily that holy matrimony exclusively between a man and woman is bias. Nor do they think listening to the late historian Shelby Foote or watching Lee, Longstreet, and their Confederate flags on Ken Burns’ Civil War constitutes a moral felony. They know also that liberal outrage is selective: Star Trek reruns won’t be pulled because gay George Takei (“Mr. Sulu”) is an abject racist [6] and on record as such. We won’t ask octogenarian William Shatner (“Captain Kirk”) to disown him. Spike Lee is a praised filmmaker, whom we forgive for peddling on film lies about the death of Malcolm X [7] and who sicced the mob on the home of the wrong George Zimmerman [8] in his quest for vigilante justice.
Amid all this leftish high-fiving about court decisions and executive orders, we forget political and electoral reality. Barack Obama has done more to destroy liberal political power in the Congress and in the statehouses than any Democratic politician since the 1920s. His executive orders and neglect of enforcing existing law have green-lighted the executive power of the next Republican president in a way that Richard Nixon could hardly imagine. He has discredited the idea of a disinterested media to such a degree that its biased audits of the next future Republican administration will be seen as laughable.
Europe and the United States are seeing glimpses of the ultimate leftist trajectory — a mixture of Greece and Detroit, de facto non-enforcement of the law, the Iranian nuke deal, a new McCarthyism, and race, class, and gender hatred — and are becoming afraid and perhaps appalled. A growing number of people sense that 21st century leftist elites are not pragmatic working people, but a privileged sect that callously experiments with other people’s lives on the understanding that they are insulated and immune from the inevitable disasters that follow from their own ideas.
A great pushback is awakening here and abroad, but its timing, nature, and future remain mysterious.
Article printed from Works and Days: http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson
URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/is-the-world-becoming-fed-up/
URLs in this post:
[1] Paula Deen: http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2013/06/23/food-network-cans-paula-deen/
[2] the cause is again public exhaustion with hypocrisy: http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2015/07/05/sanctuary-from-what/
[3] like Brian Williams: http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2015/06/19/report-brian-williams-will-still-make-close-to-10-million-after-demotion/
[4] like Al Sharpton: http://www.weaselzippers.us/184577-the-real-al-sharpton-homos-faggots-chinamen-and-more/
[5] used the murder as proof: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/617101738122866688
[6] is an abject racist: http://hotair.com/archives/2015/07/02/bad-news-from-mr-sulu-clarence-thomas-is-a-clown-in-blackface/
[7] about the death of Malcolm X: http://www.breitbart.com/big-hollywood/2015/06/29/there-is-no-moral-difference-between-malcolm-x-and-gone-with-the-wind/
[8] of the wrong George Zimmerman: http://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/2012/03/28/couple-who-fled-home-after-spike-lee-tweet-hires-law-firm/
[9] A Move Toward an Openly Gay Secretary of the Army?: http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2015/07/06/a-move-toward-an-openly-gay-secretary-of-the-army/
Copyright © 2015 Works and Days. All rights reserved.
The sound of jackboots is getting louder.
That is the sound of the IRS as the Democrats handle free speech problems.
So you don’t know that Hispanic immigrants commit higher rates of crime but are willing to throw Trump under the bus anyway? Hmmm, it seems to me that you and just about every other thoughtful political observer of the scene miss something.
Trump is the only one talking about how devastating ridiculously bad immigration policies and trade deals are for the working class – yet you miss this. I’m a fan and keep track of most of what you write and I often find that you seem to strain yourself to appreciate the lot of poor illegals who take up roost illegitimately on our land, but you seem to not have the same sympathy for an entire working class that can’t make a decent living anymore.
Save some of that sympathy for the white roofing guy who has to do jobs for an effective labor rate of 8 dollars an hour to even get some work. Tell the carpenter who makes less today for he same work than he did 10 years ago but has no other choice. Tell the workers in the 58,000 factories that have been shuttered in the U.S. in the past 15 years. Tell that the to the unskilled worker who applies for a ten dollar an hour job only to find that 200 other people have applied.
Your compassion seems misguided. How about having some for a guy like Trump who’s heart in the right place? He favors Americans over others when it comes to pursuing our national interests – is that not admirable? He’s also willing to challenge the left and the status quo.
I was never a fan of his before this. I don’t have a racist bone in my body but am OUTRAGED by our allowing 30 million Mexicans in the country since 1965. We never decided to “brown” this country as a policy, it was done illegally, illegitimately and out of the site of most Americans. It’s nothing short of a slow burn revolution.
I used to think you understood all this. Apparently not. (THIS WAS EDITED BY THE MODERATOR FOR UNCOUTH CONTENT. we exercise the right to monitor the comments we receive. We will not publish comments that include obscenities, swear-words and vulgarisms; ad hominem attacks; racist expression; rudeness or discourtesy; violations of copyright; or any other transgression of taste or civility that the editors deem unpublishable on a Hoover Institution affiliated web site. We reserve the right, also, to close down comments on a particular essay if the editors believe we have reached “saturation” point. )
If you think that’s a racist thing to say, you are no better than some unreformed Trotskyist…
Very good article. looking forward to hearing your fulsome, detailed descriptions of the benign and gracious impact that illegals have made on the towns, ranches, reservoirs, lifestyle and environment in the great, fertile region of California where you reside.
Read VDH’s book Mexifornia for all that info though he has written about it in several other articles as well. It ain’t pretty….
Just maybe the leftists are becoming more transparent.
Has Obama’s successful lying emboldened them and they’ve made the false assumption that we are all indeed a bunch of rubes?
It would be more accurate in my opinion to realize that we start from a “Live and let live’ point of view so it may take awhile for the liars to be thrown out as in the last national election.
“Dreamers” is the one that cracks me up.
Could anything be more transparent?
Nice try at some kind of Madison Avenue manipulation.
How about calling them (more realistically):
“Jumpers”?
” Fence jumpers”, “Line Jumpers”, or “Border Jumpers” ?
Your writing is clear and correct as always.
God bless the uncouth, shoot-from-the-hip, stereotyping, exaggerating, generalizing, flamboyant, sloppy, intemperate, biased, self-promoting, and boisterous Donald Trump! No sleazy character assassination in this post! No, sir!
Mr. Trump has in a few sentences canceled out 50 years of smug, mendacious, greasy lies and hypocritical posturing on the part of Republicans and Democrats. The list of leading R and D politicians who have not used the odoriferous phrase “comprehensive immigration reform” is a short list. Trump leaped over that verbal abomination to get straight to the words “border fence” which is the political version of kryptonite to the Supermen and Superwomen of the politics of my adult life.
But you run him down with your long list of cheap insults.
When I look at the masses pouring over the Southern US border and see the Southern EU borders following in the same way, it makes me think something has been planned.
At this point in time and with the brainwashed children in our school system, brings me to the conclusion that a significant part of the citizenry have loss all hope in our country and just wait for a incalculable disaster to wake us up from our ignoring slumber of the facts about us. As did the destruction and loss of life in Germany when in WWII, woke up the German people, and their belief in HItler, as with Obama.
Certainly does no good to vote for change. It will not happen. The resolution will happen in the carnage in the streets. This country is done.
I think it’s very close to that, I just don’t know how close.
Couln’t agree more. We jumped the shark in 2012 when ‘we’ reelected Obama.
Make fun of the Donald all you wish–I had the privilege of hearing him speak at Sanborn Park in Boca Raton FL. in 2008.. He is a magnificent speaker. No teleprompter, no notes, just the truth. Frankly, I believe him to be a Teddy Roosevelt type individual. My thoughts and probably many others are that we need a very strong, smart individual in the oval office who would challenge the internationals who are taking advantage of the U.S.A.. We need to kill off ISIS as that is the only thing these rabid savages understand is POWER. If they want to die for their sexual gratifications in PARADISE, LET US BE THERE TO GUIDE THEM INTO PARADISE AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE. We need to restore the greatness of the U.S.A. If we get Hillary or another Obama type–I predict the world will begin to experience another dark age and it could be hundreds of years before another renaissance.
Trump’s comments touched a nerve. Illegal immigrants aren’t a random cross section of the total Mexican population. Every rational American understands that Mexicans who come to the U.S. illegally do so for a reason, and one of those reasons is that they are a criminal and need to escape the Mexican authorities.
I work building office interiors, TI work, for the young educated tech workers here in S.F. Yes. They are changing. So curios to hear of Tomas Sowell on rent control. They pay 3,900.00 while others live for free. Water always finds its level. You can fool people with liberal left wing rhetoric. But, The truth always prevailes. Damaged yes. I work with many from Mexico and Central America. They become Americans. Hard to beat it.
”” Ragin contagion: when debtors go broke, so do mercantilist exporters.”” Interconnected dominoes.
friends:
in 30 years, there will be a greece, judging from history and all that sort of stuff.
in 30 years, there will not be a euro union, judging from history and all that sort of stuff.
john jay
p.s. in u.s. history, see the articles of confederation.
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Louis XV allegedly said it for Obummer in the mid 1700s…”Apre moi, le deluge’. As Bob Dylan said a few years later,…Everybody’s building ships and boats…everybody’s in despair…every girl and boy.”
Illegal immigrants are basically impossible in Germany. Unlike in America, where anyone can show up in your country without any form of identification, everyone who lives in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, are required to register with the Gemeindehaus (town hall). This is a legal requirement for everyone, even when you move from one town to another within the same country.
While this may bring to mind the idea of “jackboots” to you Americans, it’s actually a very practical means to know who’s living in your town and allows the cities to know exactly how many people live within their boundaries. This has much larger social benefit as population shifts can be monitored to ensure adequate housing, power, water, health care and public transportation. As populations and demographics shift, infrastructure can adjust accordingly.
It’s really no different to Americans having to register for a new driver’s license when they move within the state or obtain a new license when they move to another state. The difference is we enforce our laws and don’t allow people who shouldn’t be here in the first place.
Before you criticize a country, you would do well to come visit Germany and see for yourself how well our social democratic republic is actually working out.
We have no cities that border on third world status like Detroit. Not a single German city or towns has defaulted into bankruptcy like Stockton or Bakersfield. We have a 10th of your population but export more than the US and have lower unemployment and no where near the ruinous national debt.
We have free University education for our youth and offer both private and state medical programs that cost 10x less than anything the US can offer and all German citizens have access to health care. Our companies don’t encourage outsourcing or mass layoffs, but have implemented a program called kurzarbeit (short work). This program allows workers to work fewer hours at reduced wages. The difference in pay is made up by the government and workers maintain their positions for when the economy picks up again and then revert back to 100% full time employment. Oh and should I remind you we also enjoy six-weeks of paid vacation every year?
Of course all that has a price; it’s called working hard, saving money, not going into debt and living within your means. Something you Americans would do well to learn.
While our southern neighbors; Spain, Portugal, Greece and Italy have their own financial issues they are simply a mirror of your disastrous 2008 collapse. A collapse that was due directly to the laws your government put into place which allowed the loaning money to people who had no business borrowing it in the first place and who could never repay their debts…all backed up by the government to bail out the banks who caused the problem in the first place.
So please, stop pointing to the mote in our eyes when you still have a tree in your own.
I am completely fed up with the global situation and the silly policies of our leaders, they are incompetent, ignorant and full of contempt. I am fed up with Islamic terror and a mass migration that is destroying nations. It could all have been avoided or dealtt with if other leaders were in place that cared about the wellbeing and desires of each population.
Tolerance and rights for others but not for us.
The liberal state of New York is spending millions of tax payers money to promote “Start UP New York”. The formula or recipe for economic prosperity and job creation is stated as no taxes for 10 years. The Television adds boast “lowest corporate, personal and manufacturing taxes and no property tax for 10 years”. The state of New York is showing the height of hypocrisy by embracing and encouraging conservative free market ideals on one hand and taxing at obtuse rates the existing citizenry. The “New York Post” has described the “Start UP NY” campaign with it’s 323 million dollar price tag as an abject failure. The few businesses attracted and the few jobs created have fallen far short of the original goal. In reality given the left leaning socialist gang in Albany no entrepreneur would risk his own capital or that of his investor’s with the uncertainty of this offer. Setting aside the depreciation scales and other practical investment criteria the fact is these politicians can not be trusted. This is no more than a good old bait and switch. Not only are liberals hypocrites their actions have an appearance of schizophrenia. These Peisistratids will say and do anything to keep their place in power and the ability to belly up to the best cocktail parties in the Hampton’s.
You know when the rules of law get broken, when those in government can’t spell cat if you gave them the c and the t and when an individual who supposedly is supposed to push the ‘truth’ onto millions of viewers gets back on the air well we have to know things are seriously unmoored around here.
Thing is we have to face the fact that country doesn’t know how to frame its problems and not provide
any viable solutions for them. It’s almost as if brash oratory and opportunistic hyperbole are the only ways
To approach issues. It’s the easy way out of course. Nobody wants to get along in the ‘sandbox’ anymore.
Yeah, looks like everybody’s fed up so let the sand and dirt fly!
In reference to Sanchez; seven felonies? what happened to three strikes your out?
Three strikes didn’t apply because Mr. Lopez-Sanchez committed most of his crimes outside California. His crime here was possessing $20 of marijuana in December of 1995. A friend of mine has written the following letter to the editor of the San Francisco Examiner explaining why the Sheriff’s Office was unable to tell ICE about him so they could deport him for the sixth time.
==================
Dear Editor,
In light of the tragic and unnecessary killing of Kathryn Steinle, a young woman, by a seasoned criminal, I think it is important for people to understand how the San Francisco Sanctuary City Ordinance contributed to her death and prevented the Sheriff’s Department from handing Mr. Lopez-Sanchez over to ICE for deportation. Most people have no idea what this ordinance requires or how it is enforced.
It is true that the federal employee’s negligence in leaving his handgun in plain view in his car was a major factor in the killing. The handgun enabled Mr. Lopez-Sanchez to murder Kathryn Steinle without anyone trying to stop him. If he had attacked his victim with bare hands, her father and other people nearby would probably have stopped him. Without the gun, the murder would not have happened. Mr. Lopez-Sanchez ran around town for 76 days after his release and did not kill anyone until he got the gun.
Early in 2015 Mr. Lopez-Sanchez finished a 46-month sentence in federal prison. The Bureau of Prisons then delivered him to San Francisco, where there was a 20 year old bench warrant. Mr. Lopez-Sanchez had been arrested in December, 1995, for buying $20 worth of marijuana, and when he skipped town, a bench warrant was issued.
Today nobody gets prosecuted for buying $20 worth of marijuana, so when they took Mr. Lopez-Sanchez before a San Francisco judge on March 26, 2015, the case was dismissed.
Normally he would be free to go, but ICE, the federal immigration agency, wanted to seize him and deport him from the United States. Deputies in the Sheriff’s Department returned him to custody and asked their in-house lawyer whether there was any lawful way to turn him over to ICE without violating the Sanctuary City Ordinance.
The lawyer researched the issue for three weeks, then told them that there was no lawful way turn him over to ICE and it would violate the Sanctuary City Ordinance if they told ICE they had him in custody. They had to let him go, and so they did.
If the Sheriff’s Department had turned Mr. Lopez-Sanchez over to ICE, they would have run the risk of being hauled before the Human Rights Commission, which handles all cases involving violations of the Sanctuary City Ordinance. The Human Rights Commission has the power to make findings and report them to the Mayor, the Board of Supervisors, and the City Attorney’s Office.
Everyone knows how much Mayor Lee dislikes Sheriff Mirkarimi and how hard he tried to get him fired from his job. If the Human Rights Commission reported to Mayor Lee that Sheriff Mirkarimi had violated the Sanctuary City Ordinance in regard to Mr. Lopez-Sanchez, the consequences would have been severe, even though Mr. Lopez-Sanchez has illegally entered the country five times.
The Sanctuary City Ordinance says, in part, “No department, . . . officer or employee of the City and County of San Francisco shall use any City funds or resources to assist in the enforcement of federal immigration law . . . unless such assistance is required by federal or State statute, regulation or court decision. ”
It also prohibits “Assisting or cooperating, in one’s official capacity, with any Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) investigation, detention, or arrest procedures, . . . relating to alleged violations of the civil provisions of the federal immigration law.”
In short, all city employees, including the Sheriff’s Department, are prohibited from cooperating with ICE in detaining or arresting illegal aliens. The ordinance protects all illegal aliens equally, whether they are good, bad, or very bad.
The Sheriff’s Department follows the Sanctuary City Ordinance according to its terms. Since responding to requests for information from ICE would help them, the Sheriff’s Department doesn’t talk to them if it can be avoided. Since turning over Mr. Lopez-Sanchez would have helped ICE deport Mr. Lopez-Sanchez, the Sheriff’s Department refused to turn him over and let him go free. He behaved himself for 76 days, then murdered an innocent young woman on the 77th day.
Mr. Lopez-Sanchez is in custody again, represented by a lawyer that someone else is paying for, and the Sanctuary City Ordinance still prevents the Sheriff’s Department from cooperating with ICE. They cannot even tell ICE when or in which courtroom the preliminary hearing will be! If his lawyer gets him off on a technicality, he will walk out of the Hall of Justice, and unless ICE agents are waiting to capture him, he will disappear until the next time someone leaves a handgun under a bench.
Mayor Lee has complained about how the Sheriff’s Department obeyed the Sanctuary City Ordinance, but he is one of the authors of the ordinance. It is painfully obvious that he is trying to shift attention away from this fact by throwing Sheriff Mirkarimi under the bus. Senator Feinstein also jumped into the ring, casting blame on Sheriff Mirkarimi even though she herself sponsored legislation that empowered the sanctuary city movement and made it harder to deport people who are here illegally.
Sheriff Mirkarimi is not a lawyer, and his deputies had to consult their in-house lawyer to find out what choices they had with Mr. Lopez-Sanchez. The lawyer told them they had no choices; the law required them to let Mr. Lopez-Sanchez go and to refuse to cooperate with ICE in their efforts to deport him for the sixth time.
Sheriff Mirkarimi cannot be blamed for relying on the advice of the department’s lawyer; that is what she is paid to do, and she is good at it. And she was right.
If the Sheriff’s Department had held Mr. Lopez-Sanchez for ICE, he could have sued the City for false imprisonment, violating the Sanctuary City Ordinance, denying him due process and equal protection under the 14th Amendment, and violating 28 U.S.C. section 1983. This would have led to expensive litigation and possibly a six-figure payout to Mr. Lopez-Sanchez.
Instead of all these childish responses and finger-pointing by elected officials such as the Mayor and the Senator, everyone should “man up” and amend the Sanctuary City Ordinance to prevent any more tragedies like this from happening. The Mayor and the Board of Supervisors should work together to make this happen, and perhaps they should call it “the Kathryn Steinle law”.
In addition I urge Senator Feinstein to ask the US Attorney General to file a lawsuit declaring that the Sanctuary City Ordinance is illegal under federal law and the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, and issuing a permanent injunction directing the Sheriff’s Office to disregard the Ordinance and cooperate fully with ICE in disclosing, communicating, and turning over custody of illegal aliens.
This would not constitute a violation of the ordinance, because it contains an exception for obedience to court orders.
It is ironic than when Sheriff Mirkarimi does good things for the City, we never hear a word of praise from Mayor Lee or Senator Feinstein. For example, last month the Sheriff’s Department received a $950,000 state grant to fund programs for mentally ill prisoners to help provide transitional housing and peer specialist support when they get out.
He has also worked hard to help inmates recover from substance abuse, with vigorous promotion of Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, the Roads to Recovery treatment program for men, and the SISTER (Sister in Sober Treatment Empowered in Recovery) treatment program for women.
Yet when something over which Sheriff Mirkarimi has no control happens, the Mayor and Senator lash out and blame him for the results of policies and programs which they themselves initiated.
It is time to stop this petty political mud-slinging and start protecting the public. A kind, decent US Citizen was killed by someone who should not even have been in the country. ICE was trying, for the sixth time, to deport him, and the Sheriff’s Department was prohibited from helping them or even giving them information. It is time for us to work together to prevent future tragedies like this from occurring.
“” BRICS vow to coordinate actions to protect their economies.”” Pushing for Iran, one key for absorbing the rest of the fractured Middle East. If the “command and control” economies continue to succeed in the slow-motion control of the Middle East—– Whither Europe?? KEYSTONE,KEYSTONE.
“” Factbox: whose oil does the EU buy.”” Incredibly dependent on Russia/satellites and Middle East area. Norway oil-exports are expected to continue to fall. Europe is deeply boxed-in—- if the “command and control” economies gain suffocating “influence and control” over the Middle East area. The USA is no longer the country it once was— cannot contemplate what the above would mean for all the country’s in the world already struggling to run things smoothly and provide their populations with basic needs. Need a miracle in Russia —– Another coup d’etat like Musharraf pulled off in Pakistan
Great job, Professor Hanson. This is one of your best columns I have read.
Where is The Jacobin Club when you need them?
“” A new peak unconventional crude oil production euan mearns.”” From euanmearns.com. And see also———“” Top 5 oil producing countries could see production peak this year.”” From oilprice. China and its island/military build seen in a blazingly clear light, as well as the influence-command-control the Middle East area by the BRICS. China and India—- The mantra of grow and consume, 2.5 Billion people. BRICS breaking off from the growing bankrupt West? Place your bets. See also— “” Corker: Obama doctrine means abandoning the Middle East.”” Cheers!! Let the good-times roll…..
Important summation— Google: “” at the edge of time blog.”” For the july 11th post , China in decline. Nine links to articles which viewed as one piece, foreshadow challenges to smooth-sailing. Apologies if posting to much.