Category: Migration, Refugees, and Asylum

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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If we’re against inequality, why do we have Temporary Protected Status for migrants?

by philg

Donald Trump made the news recently for ending the Temporary Protected Status for Somali migrants who live in Minnesota. USA Today (Reuters):

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Nov. 21 that he was immediately terminating the temporary deportation protections for Somalis living in Minnesota.

Trump’s move to remove protections for Somalis comes after years of targeting Somali immigrants in every campaign cycle in Minnesota since he first ran for president in 2016. The state has become a destination for Somali immigrants in recent decades dating back to the 1990s.

In the decades since the first wave of Somali migrants came to the state, Somalis have established flourishing cultural and business districts, sent their children to its colleges and universities, and elected leaders from their own communities to Minnesota’s city councils, mayorships, legislature and to the U.S. Congress.

(It’s an established journalistic fact that the districts are “flourishing”; household income for a typical Somali family in Minnesota was less than 200% of the poverty line (source), i.e., 2/3rds of Somalis in Minnesota were eligible for SNAP/EBT, Medicaid, public housing, and Obamaphone and, therefore, “flourishing” means “lifestyle funded by taxpayers”)

This will turn out to be just a few hundred enrichers, a fraction of 705 total (see below for nationwide data).

How many Somalis are there without Temporary Protected Status, i.e., Unprotected Somalis? About 20 million (i.e., the U.S. government takes the official position that Somalia is too dangerous for a human to inhabit and, at the same time, Somalia has one of the world’s highest rates of human population growth).

If we’re against inequality, how is it reasonable to anoint 705 Somalis as being worthy of protection and at the same time say that 20 million Somalis are not worthy of protection? If Somalia is too dangerous to inhabit, thus justifying TPS for some, why shouldn’t anyone currently in Somalia have the right to go to Aden Adde International Airport in Mogadishu and get on Turkish Airlines to take up taxpayer-funded residence in the Mamdani Caliphate? Here are some $2,855 flights from Mogadishu to JFK for Christmas Day (economy is available for $1,359, but presumably the U.S. taxpayer can afford to welcome Somalis in comfort and style):

Doesn’t a hatred for inequality require that we treat all Somalis equally, without preference for Somalis who are already here in the U.S.? Same question regarding other countries. Here’s March 31, 2025 data:

What’s special about 140 Lebanese in the U.S. that entitles them to TPS while 6 million Lebanese in Lebanon get nothing? Humans cannot survive in Cameroon, which is why the population has grown from 5 million in the 1960s to 30 million today (6X), so it makes sense that 4,920 Cameroonians are entitled to TPS. But why aren’t the remaining 30 million Cameroonians entitled to move to the US and enjoy TPS?

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Growth on food stamp spending vs. growth in immigration

by philg

I hope that none of the loyal readers of this blog went hungry yesterday.

Today is the 35th anniversary of the EBT system for food stamp benefits (later, “SNAP”). The Mickey Leland Memorial Domestic Hunger Relief Act was signed on November 28, 1990. Let’s have a look at inflation-adjusted spending on taxpayer-funded food:

We’re spending roughly 14X what we spent in 1970. What else has grown dramatically since 1970? The number of foreign-born people living in the U.S. is about 5.5X:

Correlation can’t be causation here, of course, because we’re informed that low-skill migration makes America rich and the SNAP data suggest that the number of poor people in the U.S. has grown dramatically, from 17 million beneficiaries in 2000 to 42 million in 2025 (see Number of Americans dependent on food stamps has been reduced from 17 million in 2000 to only 42 million today).

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How was the immigration of Rahmanullah Lakanwal supposed to make Americans better off?

by philg

Suppose that Rahmanullah Lakanwal hadn’t shot and killed National Guard member Sarah Beckstrom nor shot Andrew Wolfe (currently in the hospital), as he recently did. How was admitting him and multiple family members to the U.S. under the Biden-Harris administration and granting him and his family permanent residence (asylum) under the current Trump administration supposed to make the typical American better off? We are informed that immigrants enrich us, but how specifically did Congress and federal bureaucrats envision that Rahmanullah Lakanwal was going to enrich us??

Separately, just a few hours after successful asylum-seeker Rahmanullah Lakanwal waged jihad in Washington, D.C., the United Nations reminded us that “Asylum is Life-Saving”:

The New York Times reminds us that the real victim here was Rahmanullah Lakanwal:

The same story makes it sound as though Rahmanullah Lakanwal loved marijuana and polygamy (“second wife”):

Mr. Lakanwal was part of that program and had resettled with his family in Washington State. … Muhammad, Mr. Lakanwal’s childhood friend, said he has last seen him a few weeks before the Taliban takeover in 2021, when Mr. Lakanwal came to Khost to marry his second wife. He had started smoking weed, Muhammad said, and ended up divorcing his new wife a few days after the wedding. Muhammed recalled that Mr. Lakanwal told him: “When he saw blood, bodies, and the wounded, he could not tolerate it, and it put a lot of pressure on his mind.”

Of course, there are quite a few U.S. states in which one can enjoy (“essential” during coronapanic) marijuana 24/7, but I’m not sure how Rahmanullah Lakanwal was going to earn enough to hang onto two female partners. I can’t find any story describing Rahmanullah Lakanwal as having a job.

Finally, let’s keep in mind that though Rahmanullah Lakanwal might end up with 100 U.S. citizen grandchildren (“with his family” implies that he came here with at least one wife and average total fertility rate in Afghanistan is around 5 (five children in a woman’s lifetime; not too many men become “pregnant people” in Afghanistan)) and Sarah Beckstrom’s genetics died with her, it wouldn’t be accurate to say that Sarah Beckstrom and her hypothetical descendants were “replaced” by Rahmanullah Lakanwal (still alive) and his actual descendants.

Related:

In case the UN tweet is memory-holed:

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The undocumented have departed, but the number of jobs keeps going up

by philg

In Immigrants expand our economy, but millions of immigrants exiting the U.S. don’t shrink our economy we looked at a New York Times report, “Immigrant Population in U.S. Drops for the First Time in Decades”: “An analysis of census data by the Pew Research Center found that between January and June, the foreign-born population declined by nearly 1.5 million.” (An analysis of January-September data by CIS found a reduction of 2.3 million.)

The Bureau of Labor Statistics says that the “Civilian noninstitutional population” is up by about 2% year-over-year (this is limited to those age 16+, which is why it isn’t the same as the 343 million official Census population estimate) and “Civilian labor force” is up by 1.5%. November news:

The rate of natural increase in the U.S. is only about 0.3% (too small for those who want the Ponzi scheme of infinite growth; excessive for those who care about the environment, traffic congestion, affordable housing, etc.). If the foreign-born population, which has been driving nearly all U.S. population growth, is shrinking, shouldn’t the number of people and the number of people in the labor force be going down or, at most, be flat?

A simple answer would be that the 1.5 million (or 2.3 million) reduction is only among noble undocumented enrichers and that we enjoyed enrichment by 3 million legal immigrants (family reunification, H-1B nonimmigrant immigrants, refugees, asylum-seekers, etc.). But that isn’t consistent with the Pew/NYT report cited above, which says that there has been in a reduction in the number of “foreign-born” residents of all categories. (The more complete CIS study also reports a “foreign-born” reduction.)

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