Category: Migration, Refugees, and Asylum

Why haven’t a lot more people been shot in Minneapolis?

by philg

Look at this scene of total chaos in Minneapolis from a few days ago:

People are even more upset this weekend because Alex Pretti was shot and killed by federal agents, just as his parents predicted. What confuses me is why there weren’t daily shootings. Pretti, for example, was armed with a gun and perhaps 51 rounds of ammo (3 magazines times 17 bullets; was he planning to shoot 51 people, to have really bad aim, or to be involved in a multi-hour gun battle?). If people on both sides of this unrest are heavily armed and passionate (the “protesters” say that they’re resisting fascism/Hitler 2.0/Gestapo 2.0) shouldn’t we expect multiple deaths from a scene like the one in the above video (at which nobody was killed, as far as I know).

Separately, here’s my idea for de-escalation: Trump renames ICE to “National Immigration and Customs Enforcement”. They’d be known as “NICE” for short. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) would become “Security & Welcome for Entry, Exit & Trade” or “SWEET”. Media headlines would then read “NICE and SWEET visit Minneapolis”. Who could get angry about that?

Related:

  • “The Subway Vigilante Who Never Left Is Back” (New York Times 2026) might explain Mr. Pretti’s epic supply of ammo. The article describes the shooting of four retired investors living on their respective pensions: “The white man who shot four Black teenagers on a downtown subway in December of 1984 … He was convicted of criminal possession of a gun and served eight months in prison … His only regret, he says, was running out of ammunition.” (Compare to NYT January 1985: “Mr. Cabey was arrested in the Bronx on Oct. 13 on charges that he held up three men with a shotgun and stole an undetermined amount of cash and jewelry. … Mr. Canty, 19, of 1372 Washington Avenue, has been arrested four times since he was 16 years old. … Mr. Allen, who is 19 and also lives in a building at 1372 Washington Avenue, is facing a jail sentence for violating probation. … He was first arrested in 1982 at the age of 16 in the Bronx for attempted assault after being accused of shooting another youth in the hand with a BB gun.”)
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Are used car prices falling now that immigrants are leaving the U.S.?

by philg

Used car prices went up to insane levels during the Biden-Harris open borders period. The Washington Post reports Brookings calculations that immigrants are now departing:

Are used car prices coming down? “Manheim Used Vehicle Value Index: December 2025 Trends”:

The Manheim Used Vehicle Value Index (MUVVI) rose to 205.5, reflecting a 0.4% increase for wholesale used-vehicle prices (adjusted for mix, mileage, and seasonality) compared to December 2024. The December index is up 0.1% month over month. The long-term average monthly move for December is flat, showing no change from month to month.

Prices actually went up in the past year? Not if you adjust for inflation. Up 0.4% is the new down once you subtract roughly 3% inflation. So the correlation with migration seems to exist, but isn’t 1.

Rents are falling, according to this industry source that takes the landlords’ perspective of higher rents = “improvement”…. “US apartment rents drop in steepest November decline in more than 15 years”:

Related:

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Why does ICE have any migrants to detain?

by philg

The U.S. is packed with sanctuary states, sanctuary cities, and noble citizens who say that they will do anything necessary to maximize the number of migrants living in the U.S. Why, then, are we seeing videos of ICE going into various low-income neighborhoods and rounding up the undocumented? There are very likely more Americans who’ve voted for open borders than there are undocumented migrants (tough to estimate the latter number, though, according to Yale). Wouldn’t we expect every undocumented migrant or family of migrants to have found a secure home in the basement or spare bedrooms of a migrant-welcoming native-born American? If that were true and if the migrants kept quiet until the U.S. was once again run by open borders enthusiasts, how could ICE ever get the necessary warrant to go into a progressive’s suburban house and detain the migrants within? The probable cause would be “shops at Costco more than once per month”?

The above-described situation would be a win-win for the hosts and the migrants. The migrants would get to stay in the U.S. forever and wouldn’t have to work. At the cost of a slightly higher grocery bill, which could be offset by avoiding Whole Foods, the hosts would be able to don the mantle of heroism previously earned by Miep and Jan Gies, two of the Dutch gentiles who hid Anne Frank and her family (Miep was rewarded by God with a 100-year life; Jan wasn’t as virtuous, apparently, and died at 87).

Related, the botanical garden in Tortola reminds us that “uncontrolled transport of plants” results in “replacement” of natives because the immigrants consume resources and reproduce rapidly.

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Small-town life in the Islamic Republic of Germany

by philg

From a reader who emigrated to Germany for work:

In my little [German] town of 32,000 people the change can be seen on the streets. In 2012 when I arrived, I did not see a single foreigner besides other EU citizens and a handful of Turks who came during 1960s. Now in the last 3 years I see Africans, Arabs, and Afghani refugees everywhere I go. I don’t see any working in jobs but lots are loitering in the town center. At work there has been a huge influx of Indians to work the IT jobs at the [multinational] company – at least they are productive tax payers. It will be interesting to see how easily they assimilate into German society. I increasingly see advertisement targeted to Indians on investing and buying real estate in Germany. Interestingly I don’t see many Chinese moving to Germany like I see in the USA. On MS teams the majority of scientists based in the USA branch of my company are mainland Chinese (e.g., recent call to data sciences team had 95% Chinese colleagues, first generation).

Home prices have shot up as well as rentals. Since 2019 both have increased by 30%, and when a rental is listed, long lines form during the open house, something you’d only see in the past in big cities like Berlin and Munich. The refugees have taken up all the low-income social housing. Even small government buildings in my residential neighborhood such as the forest registry office have been converted into housing to meet the demand.

Lines at the immigration office are also longer. Interestingly when the war broke out between Ukraine and Russia, there was a special line made just for Ukrainian refugees, to fast-track them. I didn’t remember seeing a fast track line made for the Syrians. It would be nice to see a fast-track line for employed immigrants just trying to renew their residence permit. Maybe something I should bring up the next time I go.

How about celebrating Jesus’s birthday with one’s Muslim neighbors?

Christmas market had the security blocks put in place. Two years ago that never happened.

Here’s a photo from 27 years ago of Munich’s English garden that shows a decidedly un-Islamic outfit for a female in public:

(Source: Siemens was using our open-source online community toolkit and I went over there with another software developer. They took us to a medieval-themed restaurant where forks were not provided. Any man who didn’t drink beer, e.g., me, was forced by the waitresses to wear a maid’s cap. The Siemens executives and managers thought it would be fun to see weak Americans get drunk, but my colleague was himself a heavy drinker and fairly beefy so he drank them under the table. I had a bit of mead.)

Here are a couple of crowd photos from that late 1990s trip. I don’t see anyone in a burqa or even hijab.

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Was the person killed in Minneapolis even aware that an ICE operation was in progress?

by philg

From Pink News: “Renee Nicole Good was a 37-year-old and died just a few streets away from her home, according to reporting by the Minnesota Star Tribune … Good had been married to Timmy Ray Macklin Jr., who died in 2023 at the age of 36, and had been currently living with her wife in Minneapolis alongside her six-year-old son. Good also reportedly has two other children, who live with extended family members.”

Our government says that the late Ms. Good was interfering with an ICE operation, presumably to kidnap noble Somalis who’ve done so much to enrich the U.S. But if the incident happened “just a few streets away from her home” and the ICE agents weren’t wearing conventional uniforms, is it possible that Good was interacting with ICE only by chance?

I can understand why someone who works in the Welfare-Industrial Complex (or Big Daycare) would try to stop ICE from deporting Muslims, but it doesn’t make logical sense that someone with Renée Good’s personal background would try to stop ICE from deporting Muslims. She wanted to maximize the number of Somalis who would, if they were in power, force her to become a 2nd or 3rd wife of a man instead of a lesbian partner of some other woman? And a Muslim-run nation might not let a woman unload her kids in order to enjoy more sexual freedom. (American women typically keep their kids after terminating a sexual relationship in order to harvest child support profits, but perhaps Ms. Good’s first husband didn’t earn enough money for that to make sense? (Mothers abandoning their kids to the father is much more common in Europe where child support revenue might be capped at $2,000 to $8,000 per year, depending on the country.))

Readers: What is the evidence that Ms. Good was aware of or interested in ICE operations?

Of course, I’m aware of the existence of Queers for Palestine, but I don’t think that’s quite the same. Queers for Palestine seek to impose an Islamic theocracy (Hamas rule) over Israelis. They aren’t working to subject themselves to Islamic rule.

(This post is not seeking to assign blame to anyone. With perhaps 30 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. and guns being widely distributed among both migrants and ICE agents, I’m sure that this won’t be the last death related to immigration enforcement. I’m just trying to figure out what happened. If Renée Good interacted with ICE purely by chance then her death is even sadder because of its pointlessness.)

Google AI:

consensual same-sex sexual activity is illegal in Somalia, with penalties ranging from prison sentences (up to three years under civil law) to the death penalty in areas controlled by groups like al-Shabab, all within a highly stigmatized cultural and religious environment where homosexuality is criminalized and heavily persecuted.

Related:

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Every public school should register as a Somali day care in order to receive federal funds?

by philg

The Somali immigrants who built Boston (“cannot talk about any achievement that the city of Boston has had in safety, jobs, and economic development, in education, without talking about the Somali community,” said Mayor Michelle Wu) have also been featured on X lately (not in the New York Times or CNN, though?) for harvesting federal taxpayer money via registering fictitious day cares. Example with more than 75 million views:

Public schools are always hungry for more money, e.g., to spend in administration, pensions, employee health care, etc. (occasionally on classroom instruction as well) What if every public school in the U.S. registered with Minnesota officials as a Somali day care? Just leave off the state from the address and include the ZIP code so that checks get through the mail. Minnesota politicians and state workers never noticed that the day cares they were paying were nonexistent. Why would they notice that a ZIP code to which they were mailing checks (drawn on the US Treasury) wasn’t part of Minnesota? In the unthinkably rare event that a Welfare-Industrial Complex worker comes to inspect there will almost always be children on site.

Loosely related…

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U.S. economy defies Science

by philg

We’ve been informed that low-skill migrants, as a matter of Scientific fact, are positively correlated with U.S. economic growth (at least aggregate growth if not per-capita!). Low-skill migrants have been departing the U.S. at an unprecedented rate since the Trump Dictatorship v2.0 began (CIS; NYT (covers a different time period than the CIS analysis)).

Toda we learn from the Wall Street Journal that the aggregate GDP is expanding even as the migrant population shrinks.

Maybe the GDP numbers are wrong? We can see for ourselves that valuable Somalis and Latinx are being kidnapped by ICE (should we try to fight ICElamophobia?). We know that these folks are worth $billions even though there is not another country on Planet Earth that is willing to take the migrants whom we deport (i.e., no other country wants to be enriched as we have been). If the GDP data are correct, could the apparent contradiction be explained by The Science being merely a projection of researchers’ love for migrants? “Why immigration research is probably biased” (Guenther, December 20, 2025):

All of these choices resulted in 1,261 submitted models; no two were identical. Notably, this heterogeneity arose even though the hypothesis and data were the same! Think how much freedom researchers have when they are allowed to choose the hypothesis and the data.

It is not necessarily problematic if researchers are more liberal than the general public, but it is problematic if these attitudes make them analyse data in a biased way, to arrive at conclusions that reinforce their prior attitudes. In that case, immigration research ceases to be research and transitions into propaganda, where only hypotheses are tested that one can anticipate to portray immigration positively, and the research design is chosen to obtain the desired conclusion.

Related:

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We’ve deported a college student and are keeping Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia?

by philg

We deported a Babson College student (CNN):

Kilmar Abrego Garcia is still here and still providing full employment for American attorneys (NYT):

How is it possible that nobody wants to change U.S. immigration laws? I could understand a world in which both of these non-citizens were deported. I could also understand a world of open borders in which neither of these non-citizens were deported. Given the above facts, however, I can’t understand how anyone can argue that our current immigration laws are in the U.S. national interest.

Separately, the noble enricher Kilmar has been enriching the United States for 14 years (since 2011) and hasn’t needed to learn English. Thus, someone who doesn’t speak English turns out to be more powerful than the President of the United States and all federal immigration bureaucracy put together. WBAL:

Abrego Garcia on Friday stopped at a news conference outside the building, escorted by a group of supporters chanting “We are all Kilmar!”

“I stand before you a free man and I want you to remember me this way, with my head held up high,” Abrego Garcia said through a translator. “I come here today with so much hope and I thank God who has been with me since the start with my family.”

He urged people to keep fighting.

“I stand here today with my head held high and I will continue to fight and stand firm against all of the injustices this government has done upon me,” Abrego Garcia said. “Regardless of this administration, I believe this is a country of laws and I believe that this injustice will come to an end.”

After Abrego Garcia spoke, he went through security at the field office, escorted by supporters.

The agency freed him just before 5 p.m. on Thursday in response to a ruling from Xinis, who wrote federal authorities detained him after his return to the United States without any legal basis.

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Massachusetts Immigration Update

by philg

Recent group chat from a friend in Maskachusetts who is selling his house in the rich NW suburbs:

  • another open house today – mostly Asians and Indians on indoor camera, as I predicted. MA burbs will go that way really fast. It’s a critical mass kind of thing

Later messages from a friend in a South Shore suburb of Boston:

  • Walmart had Columbian woman deliver to my house. I went to Walmart and two employees I tried to talk to could not speak English
  • Basically all of the cashiers at Hanover Market Basket are 4′ tall women from South America.

From the same chat group, regarding OpenAI’s text-to-video generator:

  • I asked Sora to make a video of a mugger. Every single time, it made the mugger white. I asked Sora to make a video of a happy family. Every single time, it showed a black man in a relationship with a white woman. According to ChatGPT: Black people make up 60% of robbery/mugging convictions. Black man/white woman marriages make up 1.3% of marriages.
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Venezuela is too dangerous for humans to occupy and also parents want their children to live in Venezuela

by philg

“Deported and Desperate to Be Reunited With Their Children” (New York Times, November 25, 2025):

Across the United States, children have been left in the care of relatives and neighbors after deportations. In Venezuela, parents are clamoring for the return of their sons and daughters.

While some families have been deported together, many mothers and fathers have been landing in Venezuela without their children, setting off a diplomatic scramble inside the Venezuelan government to track down and repatriate the children.

Families clamoring for the return of their children have put almost all their hopes in Mr. Maduro. They have readily participated in government-led rallies in Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, and recorded heartfelt videos shared on social media. In August, many families signed a letter to Melania Trump, the first lady, asking her “to listen to the cries of families.”

We’re informed that Venezuela (population nearly 30 million) is too dangerous for humans to occupy, which is why Venezuelans were able to claim asylum and Temporary Protected Status during the Biden-Harris administration (extended most recently on January 10, 2025, ten days before Joe and Kamala left office). At the same time, we’re informed that parents who love their children want their children to grow up in this place that is too dangerous for any human to occupy rather than in the cradle-to-grave welfare state of the U.S.

Separately, I still can’t figure out how any of this comports with the Constitution’s guarantee of Equal Protection or basic concepts of fairness and seeking to reduce inequality. In a Righteous American’s ideal world, a Venezuelan who was healthy enough to walk across the U.S. southern border is entitled to four generations of taxpayer-funded housing, health care, food, and smartphone. A Venezuelan who is too old, too sick, or too poor to make the journey is entitled to… nothing.

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