Acuckalypse Now! The Budget Betrayal And Trump Derangement Syndrome

By John Derbyshire

05/06/2017

And hey: We got Jeff Sessions at Justice, and a Supreme Court Appointee who isn’t an anti-white, man-hating Social Justice radical. So I’m still hoping for the best.

And, I'll say this for President Trump: He’s still hated by all the right people. Boy, how they hate him! Trump Derangement Syndrome shows no sign of abating. If anything, it seems to be getting more intense.

One of many recent examples: The New Yorker magazine, as I mentioned in my April Diary, just had a 4,000-word anti-Trump philippic by the editor, David Remnick — and a week later a much longer piece, nearly ten thousand words, by notorious staff writer Evan Osnos Endgame: What would it take to cut short Trump’s Presidency? [May 8, 2017]

Osnos stops short of calling for an assassination, but probably only because New Yorker doesn’t want the FBI banging on its door. Still, as in the late Soviet Union, when physical elimination is bothersome, you can always incarcerate an Enemy of the People in a psychiatric ward. Osnos actually considers this possibility at length, as well as impeachment, a remedy that was (of course) utterly unthinkable when VDARE.com proposed it — quite appropriately — in the case of Obama back in 2014.

I read the whole thing with a sort of grim fascination. This is wish-fulfillment fantasy for Trump haters. They can’t accept it, they just can’t accept it, that a person with heterodox opinions got elected President, that 62 million Americans voted for him.

But now my disappointments:

Three weeks ago, I grumbled about what I called The Big Cuck. Last week, I upgraded my disgust: not merely a Big Cuck, a Cuck-o-rama. Following the congressional budget deal announced Sunday night, I’m going to have to take it to the next level: no transient, footling Cuck-o-rama — this is the Acuckalypse!

[Clip: "Ride of the Valkyries."]

Quote from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer: "The bill ensures taxpayer dollars aren’t used to fund an ineffective border wall."

Quote from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi: "The [budget deal] does not fund President Trump’s immoral and unwise border wall or create a cruel new deportation force."

Note the word "minority" in the congressional titles of both Schumer and Pelosi. As representatives of the minority in both Senate and House, how were these reptiles able to get their way on a major issue in the Trump electoral agenda? What was the majority doing while the minority killed off the biggest vote-getter of the last election season?

Cucking, that’s what. You remember that TV show Bowling for Dollars? Well, the GOP congresscritters are cucking for donors.

Thus not only did last weekend’s spending bill trash the wall, it also allowed a big expansion of H-2B guest-worker visas. CITE

The H-2B visa is for low-skilled seasonal, non-agricultural workers. Landscaping firms use them, for example: not much landscaping work gets done in the winter. Logging companies, which don’t count as agricultural, use them. So do summer resorts and amusement parks. National parks, too: If you stopped off for a snack at Yosemite Lodge Food Court last summer, that young lady from Kazakhstan who served you was on an H-2B visa.

A good alternative name for the H-2B visa would in fact be the Keep American Kids Out of Summer Vacation Jobs visa.

Apologists for the visa tell you they can’t get American teenagers to do these jobs. I don’t know which teenagers they're talking about. My son, who is not sensationally industrious, used to work landscaping in the summer vacation when he was at high school. His best friend’s father owns a landscaping firm, so the two lads would work together for him. My boy greatly appreciated the few dollars he made landscaping. Is he really such an outlier among American youngsters?

Don’t take it from me. Here’s Daniel Costa (right) of the Economics Policy Institute testifying before a Senate committee last June:

Despite … claims from industry groups — other than employer anecdotes — no credible data or labor market metrics have been presented by non-employer-affiliated groups or organizations — let alone by disinterested academics — proving the existence of labor shortages in H-2B occupations that could justify a large expansion of the H-2B program.

The H-2B temporary foreign worker program |Examining the effects on Americans’ job opportunities and wages, June 8, 2016

This didn’t come out of the blue. Congressional donor-puppets have been scheming to get H-2B expansion into the first available piece of spending legislation since the last expansion in 2015. Here’s a report from Politico.com:

The H-2B Workforce Coalition, a lobby group that includes dozens of business associations, wants the visa total to rise again

There’s bipartisan support for an expansion: 32 Republican and Democratic senators sent a letter to DHS Sec. John Kelly in March to protest the limited number of visas. In addition, Sens. Tom Tillis (R-N.C.) and Angus King (I-Maine) have cosponsored legislation that would make the exemption permanent.

Clock ticking for H-2B expansion, By Marianne LeVine, Politico, April 14, 2017

A side benefit is of course to enrich lawyers. We mustn’t forget the lawyers! Applying for H-2B visas is a long and complicated process — so much so, there are lawyers who specialize in that one visa.

And because, as everyone knows, immigration is an unqualified good, and ours is a nation of immigrants, and American workers are lazy and useless, these immigration lawyers are doing God’s work.

Here by the way is the next sentence from that April 14th Politico report:

You might expect an "America First" president to oppose the H-2B program, but President Trump has steered clear of the issue so far.

Note one: Foreigners who don’t want to go to the trouble of acquiring an H-2B visa or some other guest-worker visa can just get a tourist or student visa and overstay it.

Huge numbers of foreigners do this. How many? In 2015, for the first time ever, the Department of Homeland Security tried to find out. In February last year they produced a report. [Homeland Security produces first estimate of foreign visitors to U.S. who overstay deadline to leave, By Jeffrey S. Passel and D’Vera Cohn, February 3, 2016]

In that year, the year 2015, the report says that 45 million non-worker visas — these are tourist and business visas — 45 million visas expired. Of that number, more than 400,000 visa holders — a bit less than one percent — overstayed. Lead countries for visa overstays: Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Germany.

The problem here is crappy IT. Quote from a Daily Caller report by Ethan Barton, May 4th, quote:

Information on visa holders is held in 27 DHS information technology systems that can’t communicate with each other.

Report: Massive Overstayed Visa Backlog May Threaten National Security

Note two: Numbers USA’s Chris Chmielenski has pointed out in an email that spending bill

gives the Administration full authority over the visa increase. We're hoping that the Administration will tell Congress ‘thanks, but no thanks” on the increase and remain true to Trump’s campaign pledge to protect the jobs and wages of American workers.

John Derbyshire writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him. ) He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books. He’s had two books published by VDARE.com: FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT (also available in Kindle) and From the Dissident Right II: Essays 2013. His writings are archived at JohnDerbyshire.com.

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