Sacramento Democrats Fire on Fort Sumter

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American Greatness

Sacramento Democrats Fire on Fort Sumter

By Michael Walsh| January 4, 2018

Heading into 2018, but still flying below the national radar, the state of California is on a confrontation course with the federal government in Washington, D.C. Given that Washington is crawling with reporters—because, these days, there is apparently no news that somehow does not involve or concern Donald J. Trump—it might seem odd that you’re not reading about it every day. But here we are:

 The acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement says politicians who run sanctuary cities should be charged with crimes. Thomas Homan said in an interview Tuesday with Fox News Channel’s Neil Cavuto that the Department of Justice needs to file charges against municipalities that don’t cooperate with federal immigration authorities and deny them funding. He also says politicians should be held “personally accountable” for crimes committed by people living in the U.S. illegally. Homan says, “We’ve got to start charging some of these politicians with crimes.”

What provoked this extraordinary statement is California’s open defiance of federal immigration law, embodied in the state’s becoming a “sanctuary” for illegal aliens as of January 1.                 

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California, The Rhetoric Of Illegal Immigration, And The Perils Of Ignoring Thucydides’s Warning

by Victor Davis Hanson

Tuesday, November 7, 2017

Vocabulary changes always reflect the agendas of a political debate.

The fight over illegal immigration plays out by altering words and their meanings. Take the traditional rubric “illegal alien.” The English has been clear and exact for nearly a century: illegal alien (cf. Latin alienus) was a descriptive term for any foreigner who crossed the US border without coming through customs to obtain proper legal sanction.

Illegal alien, then, was a politically neutral, exact, and descriptive term: one used by both the Supreme Court and Internal Revenue Service.

But open-borders advocates did not like the adjective and noun because they accurately emphasized both illegality and the foreignness of those arriving into the United States from another country.

What followed was a slow Orwellian devolution. Illegal alien initially was reinvented as “undocumented alien,” as if the violation became one of simply forgetting (rather than never having) one’s supposed legal documents at home. But the noun “alien” still implied arrivals were somehow separate from US citizens by virtue of their illegal resident status. So next the noun changed to immigrant, as if undocumented immigrant gave the impression that forgetful visitors had just strayed innocently across the border.     https://www.hoover.org/research/california-rhetoric-illegal-immigration-and-perils-ignoring-thucydidess-warning