Category: Migration, Refugees, and Asylum

WSJ: Open borders make the U.S. rich and also Social Security is going broke faster than expected

by philg

Happy Independence Day for those who celebrate our traitorous rebellion against legitimate British rule and a total tax burden of 2 percent of income, not a penny of which the British ever spent outside of North America (the Brits spent a huge amount of treasure defending the white immigrants from Native Americans who objected to being replaced via white immigration).

Since a country is defined primarily by its people, let’s take a look at two perspectives on low-skill immigration today. Both perspectives are from the same newspaper, one from when Joe Biden was still running for reelection on the basis of what the media reported to be his perfectly sharp mind. The second is a recent piece, published during the Trump Dictatorship v2.0.

June 2024, Wall Street Journal:

Immigration Is Behind the Strong U.S. Economy

The U.S. population is aging, and millions of baby boomers retire each year. We can expect that absent immigration, we would have a decreasing working-age population and shrinking employment for decades to come—especially considering the low fertility rate. … immigrants help the economy in a few other ways. First, immigrants are more likely to be of working age than their U.S.-born counterparts, so they can help support American retirees through their labor and taxes. Second, immigrants bring innovation that helps the economy grow.

June 2025, Wall Street Journal:

Social Security’s Potential Insolvency Date Moves Up One Year

With an aging U.S. population and a smaller share of American workers who pay into it, Social Security could become unable to pay full retirement and disability benefits in 2034, one year earlier than reported last year, the program’s trustees said Wednesday. … The report also said that Medicare’s hospital-insurance trust fund would be able to pay 100% of benefits until 2033, three years earlier than projected in last year’s report. At that stage, the fund’s reserves would be depleted and the income going into the program would be able to pay 89% of total scheduled benefits.

We had four years of open borders under the Biden/Harris/WhoeverWasActuallyInCharge administration and at least 10 million migrants who enriched us economically as well as culturally. We had SARS-CoV-2, a virus that killed nearly 1 million over-65 Americans who were, according to #Science, otherwise in perfect health and would have been collecting Social Security and Medicare for 10 additional years. Despite these massive tailwinds, Social Security and Medicare are running out of money faster than expected?

I wonder if this changes the calculation of the optimum time to begin drawing on Social Security. Traditionally, healthy people are told to wait until age 70, three years beyond Full Retirement Age (67 for those born in 1960 or later), in order to maximize the payout. But if benefits are likely to be cut in 2034, it might be smarter for a 67-year-old in 2025 to begin taking Social Security right now.

See also “Immigration does not solve population decline” (Aporia):

The thing is: immigrants age too. This means that while immigration can definitely reverse population decline, it can’t do much for population aging. Assuming immigrant age-structure and fertility remain constant, the difference in the working-age share of the population in 2060 between zero net migration and 2019 levels of migration in the United States is… 2% (57% vs 59%).

The good news for those who believe that working age migrants will solve all of our fiscal problems: “Kilmar Abrego Garcia brought back to US, appears in court on charges of smuggling migrants” (ABC). Also “Ohio man hid horrific role in 1994 Rwanda genocide to enter US, arrested after years on the run: DOJ” (New York Post). Imagine the taxes that Vincent Nzigiyimfura, admitted to the U.S. at age 49 and currently aged 65, will be paying after he serves the 30 years in prison that our wise government overlords are currently attempt to impose on him.

Loosely related, residents of Westfield, Maskachusetts who appear to have a personal stake in Social Security benefit levels hold a whites-only “No Kings” protest:

Also, it is never appropriate to conduct a fiscal analysis when considering immigration. If you’re not a hater you have to support open borders. Sticker on a mailbox outside a coffee shop in Boise, Idaho, yesterday:

Love has no borders.

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Will California’s high-speed rail line be vulnerable to drone-based jihad?

by philg

Assuming that they can get their hands on $100 billion (or maybe $200 billion, or maybe $300 billion) in federal tax dollars, Californians will eventually have a high-speed rail line (the groundbreaking ceremony was 10.5 years ago). In light of recent drone attacks within Russia and Iran, the question for today is whether the fancy new train will be a sitting duck for jihadis. From the Wall Street Journal:

From the BBC:

Maybe anti-drone defense systems could be built around U.S. airports and an airplane should be safe from low-tech attack at 30,000′, but how would a 500-mile rail line conceivably be secured? California has already experienced jihad from Syed Rizwan Farook, born to immigrants from Pakistan, and Tashfeen Malik, a legal immigrant from Pakistan (they killed 14 of their neighbors/coworkers with guns and had hoped to kill more, but their pipe bombs failed to explode). By the time the high-speed rail is finally ready presumably the knowledge of how to build suicide drones will be far more widespread. A drone can fly from a few miles away, park itself on the ground between the rails a few minutes before the train is due, and detonate when its camera sees the train rolling over it, thus derailing the train. All of this can be fully automated with no need for radio communication back to an operator. The tracks don’t move so the lat/long of the landing spot can be preprogrammed. Nothing drives over these tracks except high-speed trains and, therefore, the “detect a train” logic need not be sophisticated.

(Of course, I continue to be mystified as to how Californians can simultaneously say (a) they hate inequality, and (b) they want all of this federal money rather than seeing it spent in poorer-than-average states. Why don’t they want federal money spent in ways that reduce inequality?)

Maybe the answer will be a grid of sensor-equipped poles arranged along the entire route? They can use radar and optical cameras to look for aerial drones and also drones that crawl over the ground. But given that a drone can pop up from a shipping crate just a minute before a train is due and land 30 seconds before a train is due to pass, how can surveillance alone be effective? Californians didn’t object to a year or two of lockdown and school closure in exchange for a perceived higher level of security from Covid so maybe they would also accept a security corridor for a few miles on either side of the track in which humans are forbidden to enter. On the other hand, a clever jihadi could perhaps make a drone that looks like an animal of some kind.

Note that the same question can be asked about a lot of U.S. infrastructure. We have open borders by design, including to people who say that they hate the United States (an application for asylum is based on a fear of being harmed in some other country, not on any kind of affection for or loyalty to the U.S.). What stops a foreign power from sending a few hundred soldiers over as asylum-seekers and having them quietly build attack drones? The foreign power could guarantee that their asylum application will be accepted by publishing a list of the soldiers’ names and saying “All of the people on this list are sentenced to death due to their political opinions.” Anyone under a definitive sentence of death for a political point of view meets U.S. asylum criteria, right? “Membership in a particular social group” is also a slam-dunk and “LGBTI” is considered a “group” so the foreign power could make sure that its army gets into the U.S. by publishing a list of soldiers’ names and saying “All of the men on this list were discovered at a gay bathhouse and, therefore, are sentenced to death if apprehended.” From a USCIS training document:

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A Greta Thunberg yacht trip to California?

by philg

Greta Thunberg is back in Europe after her heroic aid trip to Gaza. There are some open questions regarding this trip:

  • why does someone who says that the Earth is being destroyed by humans choose the Palestinians, close to world #1 in fertility and population growth, as her model society? Just imagine the CO2 output if every group of humans on this planet had 4-6 children per family, as is common among Palestinians entitled to UNRWA aid (i.e., free food, health care, education, etc., even if nobody ever works at any job other than Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad soldier)
  • why was a female do-gooder visiting a group of Muslims (the noble Gazans) not wearing hijab and/or burqa?

I’m not holding my breath for answers to the above, but now that we apparently need not worry about climate change, perhaps the highest and best use for Greta Thunberg would be a diesel-fueled yacht trip to deliver aid to the Californians who are currently #resisting an occupying military.

Let’s look at some photos from my recent visit to the teen section of the central Los Angeles Public Library, which officially teaches cooperation via smartphone to evade ICE. An important way to “keep our community safe” is to prevent federal government workers from doing their jobs:

The #Science section in which we learn that SARS-CoV-2 is no match for teenagers wearing masks and voluntarily receiving an injection of an experimental vaccine that is reserved for those 75 years and older in the UK:

The library has an official “favorite drag queen” and he/she/ze/they recently performed for teenagers:

Any books for the teens to read after the drag show?

Finally, remember that Los Angeles is a hate-free zone (which is why Donald Trump and ICE are being welcomed with love?):

Readers: What should Greta T deliver to the besieged folks in Los Angeles?

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New York Times offers a new immigrant-rich history of jet engines

by philg

“The U.S. Deported This Chinese Scientist, in a Decision That Changed World History” (New York Times, May 30, 2025):

In 1950, though it didn’t know it yet, the American government held one of the keys to winning the Cold War: Qian Xuesen, a brilliant Chinese rocket scientist who had already transformed the fields of aerospace and weaponry. In the halls of the California Institute of Technology and M.I.T., he had helped solve the riddle of jet propulsion and developed America’s first guided ballistic missiles.

The immigrant invented the jet engine, then? The Wikipedia history of the jet engine credits various English and European engineers, notably Frank Whittle, with most of the “riddle-solving” work done more than 20 years prior to 1950.

I wonder how many more years it will be before all textbooks relate a history of science and technology in which all innovations are from migrants, the 2SLGBTQQIA+, women, and Engineers of Color.

Below, Qian Xuesen’s Gloster Meteor.

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Why isn’t Mohamed Sabry Soliman called “Colorado father”?

by philg

Kilmar Abrego Garcia is “Maryland father” according to our esteemed journalists. From the Journal of Popular Studies, for example:

Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland father who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador by the Trump administration due to an “administrative error,” is “alive and secure” in prison, U.S. officials shared.

Mohamed Sabry Soliman is referred to as “Egyptian man”. As the father of five, wouldn’t it be fair to say that Mr. Soliman earned the “Colorado father” sobriquet? From New York, for example:

When authorities arrived on the scene, they arrested Mohamed Sabry Soliman, a 45-year-old Egyptian man from El Paso County

(“Mohamed of El Paso” would also have worked as a moniker?)

NBC:

The wife and five children of an Egyptian man accused of throwing Molotov cocktails at people in Boulder demonstrating for the release of Israeli hostages

I still can’t figure out why we needed to have these seven Egyptians (Mohamed, his wife, and their five children) as neighbors while we did not necessarily need the other 115 million Egyptians. What is our selection process? Plainly, since we haven’t eliminated our asylum offer, we want to run a shelter for stray Egyptians, but we accept only some of the strays. We accepted Mohamed Sabry Soliman and his six family members because he supports the Muslim Brotherhood, which the Egyptian government seeks to suppress? Or was there some other rationale?

Loosely related… what one enthusiast was able to learn about Mohamed Sabry Soliman via careful examination of his online profile:

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How was the immigration of Mohamed Sabry Soliman supposed to benefit Americans?

by philg

Egyptian enricher Mohamed Sabry Soliman recently attacked some Jews in Boulder, Colorado who were out of step with the Free Palestine portion of the Progressive dogma.

Colorado Public Radio (1% taxpayer funded and also at risk of extinction if taxpayer funds are cut off):

Federal agents said Mohamed Sabry Soliman told police after his arrest in a Boulder firebombing that he planned his attack for a year, would do it again if he could and “wished they all were dead.”

According to a federal criminal complaint filed Monday morning, Soliman, 45, threw two lit Molotov cocktails at the gathering near the Boulder courthouse, yelling “Free Palestine!”

Soliman was born in Egypt and applied for U.S. asylum in September 2022, after arriving on a tourist visa according to federal authorities. He previously spent 17 years in Kuwait before moving to Colorado Springs three years ago, according to the state arrest paperwork.

According to Assistant Secretary Dept. of Homeland Security Tricia Mclaughlin, Soliman entered the country in August 2022 on a B2 tourism visa in California that expired in February 2023. He filed for asylum in September 2022.

Question for today: If Mohamed Sabry Soliman had committed no crimes of any kind how would his presence in the United States have made native-born Americans better off? What was the best case scenario and, therefore, the rationale for our policy? (Or maybe the answer is that we have intentionally set up an immigration policy to make ourselves worse off?)

Separately, the asylum claim is kind of interesting. Some U.S. bureaucrats apparently believed Mohamed Sabry Soliman’s assertion that Egypt was too dangerous for a human to inhabit. At the same time, the country that is too dangerous for humans to inhabit now has roughly 4X as many humans as it did in 1960.

Related:

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What would it cost to deport undocumented migrants with due process?

by philg

Happy National Immigrant Heritage Month to those who celebrate.

My lawyer friends are generally in favor of anything that leads to more fees for lawyers. They all support gay marriage, for example, because no attorney can collect $1000/hr to handle a gay divorce unless there has first been a gay marriage (see “I Got Gay Married. I Got Gay Divorced. I Regret Both.” (NYT) for how attorneys mined out the life savings of two women, something that wouldn’t previously have been possible).

Recently, the more deplorable of these lawyers have been saying “I want all undocumented migrants deported, but only with due process.” By “due process” they mean the kind of full-scale trial that we would normally hold for someone accused of a crime (in most cases, though, neither the government nor the defendant can afford to go to trial so the result is plea bargaining). Democrat lawyers agree. They want a trial for each migrant, but with the outcome being that the precious migrant can stay in the U.S. forever.

Let’s see how much work would be generated for attorneys if we subscribed to this plan.

There won’t be any plea bargaining because there is no possibility of compromise in the binary decision of citizenship/expulsion. Every case will, therefore, go to trial. Every case will involve complicated facts, typically requiring travel to a foreign country to investigate, e.g., what was happening circa 2010 with the pupusa stand that purportedly resulted in Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia being targeted for death by Salvadoran gangs (CNN). So let’s assume 1,000 hours of attorney time for the prosecution and the same 1,000 hours for the defense all the way through trial. The additional lawyers who must be paid include the judges and their clerks (another 300 hours per case, perhaps). The costs of running the courthouse, the admin staff, the security guards, and the court reporters will be folded into an hourly fee, as will the costs of running the prosecution and defense law firms. Let’s assume $300 per attorney-hour as the full cost including all of these admin and support expenses. Each undocumented migrant who goes through the due process that my attorney friends envision will thus consume 2300*$300 = $690,000 in fees. That’s a lot less than the cost of handling a federal criminal court charge (I learned in 2013 that it would cost $1.5 million in 2013 dollars for a proper defense; adjusted for Bidenflation that would be $2.5 million? Then the prosecution would spent money and also the court itself, so perhaps $4 million total?) so it seems like this is the smallest conceivable number.

How many undocumented migrants are there in the U.S. today? For about 30 years we’ve been hearing “11 million”. Yale found 22 million in 2016:

Given the open border of the Biden-Harris years, therefore, there should be at least 30 million (undocumented migrant) candidates for due process. Multiplying out 30 million times $690,000 results in a total cost to U.S. taxpayers of $20 trillion. For reference, the current national debt is about $37 trillion (source), though that understates our indebtedness because it doesn’t count state and local pension obligations, forecast future Medicare and Social Security costs, etc. The current annual US GDP is about $28 trillion.

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How many migrants will the Catholic Church settle on its 177 million acres?

by philg

The Catholic Church has selected a new pope, a man who fled the violence and dysfunction of his native Chicago to live in comparatively peaceful/safe Peru and, more recently, in the migrant-free environment of Vatican City:

New York Times:

Taking the name Pope Leo XIV, he shares Francis’ commitment to helping the poor and migrants.

The Catholic Church owns 177 million acres of land worldwide (source). The Church does make changes to its real estate portfolio periodically. For example, in 2024 it sold a church in the Northeast:

Father Larochelle said Muhammad Quandil and Sadaf Ali of North Attleboro purchased St. Augustine Church for $675,000 on Aug. 23. The sale included the church with an attached parish center, a separate rectory building and a parking lot.

Father Larochelle said the buyers plan to use buildings for functions and events for the religious community at the mosque they belong to in North Smithfield, Rhode Island, about 10 minutes away. The mosque, a place of worship for Muslims, has no room to expand on site in Rhode Island because of wetlands, Father Larochelle said.

(No matter how many churches are turned into mosques we should remember that in no way are Christians in the U.S. being “replaced” by Muslims. That’s a discredited conspiracy theory.)

The question for today: of the 1,400+ parishes that the Catholic Church has shut down in the U.S. during this most recent immigration wave (not a “replacement”), how many were turned into migrant housing? California, New York, and Maskachusetts are packed with rich Catholics, for example. Where are the Catholic-funded apartments or houses for migrants in California, New York, and Maskachusetts? We can find articles about Church property becoming mosques. Who can find an article about Church property becoming a permanent home for enrichers?

Also, in September the new pope will be 70 years old. Wouldn’t it make more sense for a younger executive to assume this role? Pope John Paul II started the job at age 58.

Here’s what ChatGPT 4o thinks Vatican City would look like if some apartment towers for migrants were added:

This is the best that ChatGPT could do for a church-to-migrant-housing transformation:

Loosely related…

Speaking of Illinois, should we give the new pope credit for having escaped the violence, dysfunction, and high taxes of his native Chicago in favor of the relative safety, order, and efficiency of Peru? (He was there 2014-2023.)

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Should El Salvador sell tours at CECOT prison?

by philg

El Salvador is one of the world’s safest countries, according to one part of the U.S. government (State Department, which says it is safer than France or Sweden). The murder rate is less than 1/30th what Americans risk in what we’re told are our greatest cities. El Salvador is also one of the most dangerous countries on Earth, according to a different part. In fact, it is too dangerous for anyone to live in and that’s why any Salvadoran here in the U.S. is immune from deportation (“Temporary Protected Status” that is permanently extended).

I’m wondering if the El Salvador government should operate tours at its Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT). This should appeal equally to Democrats and Republicans. To Democrats, the tour can be marketed as “Visit the folks who formerly embodied all that is best about the United States” (extra $5,000 fee to drink margaritas with Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the most precious and important human ever to reside in Maryland). For Republicans, it can be marketed as a Fantasy Law & Order experience with an extra $5,000 fee to attend a morning briefing with CECOT guards, do physical training, and then practice on the rifle and pistol ranges.

What else is there to do? TripAdvisor:

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If Congress repealed the Refugee Act of 1980 would the fight over migrants between the Trump administration and the court system end?

by philg

The court system has been obstructing the Trump administration’s attempts to deport various classes of undocumented migrants who are here in the U.S. One might imagine that making a deportation decision would be a simple process. A migrant who lacks either a visa or a green card is ineligible for U.S. residence and, therefore, he/she/ze/they can be deported. Because, however, any migrant is entitled to make an asylum claim, e.g., as Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia did in 2019 (eight years after illegally entering the U.S.). At that point, some folks reasonably argue that “due process” requires U.S. government workers to determine whether the tale told by the asylum-seeker is true (see Federal government weighs in on a 15-year-old pupusa dispute (Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia)). It’s unclear why anyone thinks truth determination is possible. Only one side of the story is available, i.e., from the migrant who stands to gain four generations of a work-optional lifestyle (entitlement to public housing, Medicaid, SNAP/EBT, and Obamaphone). It’s an absurd farce in which the winners are those with the best acting skills, but it’s guaranteed to be an expensive farce with hundreds or thousands of hours invested by lawyers on all sides (government, migrant, judges) for each migrant whose status is determined. Other than high fees, the one thing all of these lawyers will have in common: none will have any clue about what actually happened on the other side of the world 5, 10, 15, or 20 years ago.

(Another farcical element is that nothing stops a Salvadoran from claiming that El Salvador, 20X safer than Baltimore or Washington, D.C., is too dangerous and that therefore he needs to live right here in the country where most of the most violent Salvadorans now reside.)

How did we get to the point that every migrant who strolls across the border can impose a $1 million cost in legal fees on the U.S. taxpayer? Professor of Constitutional Law Dr. ChatGPT, JD, PhD explains that we can thank the noblest of all U.S. Presidents, Jimmy Carter:

The premise of the asylum framework seems to be that Earth is generally too dangerous to be occupied by humans with the exception of the United States, which is the only safe place. World population in 1950 was about 2.5 billion people and 4.4 billion in 1980. Today, despite the fact that almost every country is officially deemed too dangerous to inhabit, the human population is somewhere between 8 and 10 billion (nobody knows).

Republicans have control of Congress right now. Instead of these constant fights with the courts regarding whether anyone can be deported, wouldn’t it make more sense for Trump to ask Congress to repeal the Refugee Act of 1980 and pass a new law that says “The United States does not offer temporary or permanent residence on the basis of an asylum claim and, in fact, does not offer asylum. It is a shame that various countries at various times have problems, but Americans hope that people who live in those countries will cooperate to work out their problems.” Asylum-seekers wouldn’t be disadvantaged by such a change because anyone who wants to seek asylum can do so in Canada, Mexico, the UK, Germany, etc.

Loosely related… (source)

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