Morgan Griffith on Border Security

This time I'll display Congressman Griffith's E-Newsletter first: 

"

Border Problems Continue

When asked recently by NBC News whether the border is secure, Vice President Kamala Harris, the Biden Administration’s “border czar,” said, "We have a secure border in that that is a priority for any nation."

The Vice President’s confusing syntax aside, the only answer to the question “Is the border secure?” right now must be “No.”

A secure border would not be setting records for daily encounters of illegal immigrants, but the Washington Free Beacon reported on September 15 that internal U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) documents indicate about 8,000 illegal immigrant encounters are taking place at the border each day, the highest daily number in our history.

If the border were secure, we would not hear howling when governors on the southern border send a few busloads of illegal immigrants to areas that commonly vote for the politicians that oppose fully securing the border.

Sustained high daily numbers of encounters, just the latest negative record set at the border under the Biden Administration, mock the idea that the border is anything close to secure. Border Patrol agents cannot adequately respond to the situation. The astounding numbers of illegal immigrants at the border, many of whom are eventually released into our country, also signal to others contemplating unlawful entry that they can make the attempt without having to worry about legal consequences.

An uncontrolled border also offers plenty of opportunities for criminals or other unscrupulous actors to gain. Cartels traffic people across the border with little regard for the illegal immigrants in their charge and smuggle drugs that make their way to communities across the country, including some in Virginia’s Ninth Congressional District.

Utter incompetence and mismanagement allow some of these unscrupulous actors to cash in with American taxpayer dollars.

Illegal immigrant minors who are caught crossing the border are detained and housed while the Federal Government seeks sponsors in our country to take them into custody. The government often contracts with nongovernmental organizations to provide these services, but recent arrests and indictments suggest the government cannot always find trustworthy partners.

At the beginning of September, the CEO of International Education Services, a contractor providing temporary shelter and other services for unaccompanied alien minors, was indicted by a federal grand jury on embezzlement and theft charges.

News reports on the indictment report that International Education Services received almost all its funding through federal grants. The indictment alleges that the CEO, Ruben Gallegos Jr., used grant money to pay to himself and other individuals salaries hundreds of thousands of dollars above a cap imposed by federal regulations. While the cap was $187,000, Mr. Gallegos in four separate years paid himself salaries ranging from $435,417 to $492,002. He also used grant money to lease properties from himself at excessive rates.

While the Biden Administration’s chosen leaders for DHS have created many of the problems along the border, responsibility for unaccompanied alien minors falls under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). This agency comes under the congressional oversight jurisdiction of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, on which I serve.

From trips to the border and oversight work, I have noticed problems myself with how ORR vets the people it gives the minors to for care. To match these minors with family members already in the country, I found that ORR relies on common background search websites that often turn up incorrect or incomplete information, instead of a full-blown criminal background check.

To be clear, these minors should not come here illegally, but if we are going to allow them here and claim to be looking out for them, ORR should not compound the damage by potentially matching them with people who have not been properly vetted.

If in the future I were honored to serve as the Chairman of the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee of Energy and Commerce, I would strive to hold HHS leadership accountable on how it performs its duties at the border.

Of course, the best way to avoid problems with placing illegal immigrants is securing the border. As long as the Biden Administration avoids taking this action, it is responsible for the legal and humanitarian disaster that results.

If you have questions, concerns, or comments, feel free to contact my office. You can call my Abingdon office at 276-525-1405, my Christiansburg office at 540-381-5671, or my Washington office at 202-225-3861. To reach my office via email, please visit my website at www.morgangriffith.house.gov. Also on my website is the latest material from my office, including information on votes recently taken on the floor of the House of Representatives.

" 

Now the comment:

Contrary to what some want to believe, I am not prejudiced against South Americans nor unwilling to help them. Even my Republican mother never was like that. Why would a couple who spoke only English, themselves, have spent time and money trying to bring up trilingual children? In case we met people who spoke only French or Spanish, they wanted us to be the ones who could communicate with them. 

"Brown people?" Don't even go there. For one thing, if we're going to use those old color names, Native Americans were Red; Indians from India were Brown. Anyway, I'm biracial myself. I like copper-toned skin. 

I'm fiscally conservative and socially--maybe some people prefer the word "libertarian." Some people in the Libertarian Party favor open borders, letting people come and go between countries as casually as they do between the United States. I used to think that was a reasonable point of view. The reason why more people don't take that point of view, now, is that the parts of the United States where people want to live are badly overpopulated. Too many jobs have been made obsolete at the same time too many babies have been born. We are no longer a land of wide-open opportunities for immigrants. We may need to redesign the Statue of Liberty in such a way that she seems to be telling the world, "There's no room for you here. Go home and assert your right to liberty in your own countries." 

I think the party who want to keep bringing in immigrants could stand to be hit harder. Understandably reticent about the details, they basically want to keep the unsustainable Social Security system afloat a little longer by creating a class of second-class citizens who will have to pay more in and get less out of the system. (No doubt they're planning to appeal to the human instinct for fairness to ensure that today's young people will also pay more in and get less out, eventually.) Their plans for humankind are based on numbers. They imagine that a certain number of bodies can be packed into a certain amount of space, and they overestimate that number. They are planning to build slums where the next generation can die of plagues.  Likely they are feeling very good about themselves for having completed the courses of training that they were told prepared them to do all this planning for other people, and shoring up this good feeling about themselves by imagining that the "apartment towers" they build are going to be anything but slums--but they are deluding themselves. 

A typical example of what happens when people think of other people as groups or numbers is the farce of "taking care of children, sending them to relatives," discussed in the E-Newsletter above. Have you ever looked up an old friend on Google? Try...looking up the obituary for someone you know is no longer living, since we don't want to put any living people's names online. Go ahead and try it. Google, e.g., "Mary Ann Smith obituary Omaha Nebraska 2015." Google's algorithm is designed to cover a wide range of information. In this case the algorithm is not appropriate to the question asked. Watch Google pull up obituaries for Mary Ann Smith who died in Peoria, Illinois, in 2013, and for Mary Jane Smith who died in San Francisco in 2020, and Mary Ann Jones from Lincoln, Nebraska, who is still alive, and John Martin Smith who died in Omaha in 2018, and then there's John Quincy Smith, father of Mary Ann and Jane Ellen, who died in Omaha in 1989...I can believe a social worker, somewhere, has actually sent a child off to stay with someone who might or might not have been a relative, or still in the city listed, or still alive, based on a Google search for a name. If the relative is intelligent enough to take responsibility for the child, per name will not turn up in a Google search, or not with reliable information attached to it. If Google pulls up accurate information about a living person from a search for the perosn's name, that's a person into whose custody you don't want to entrust a child.

It goes to show that the people who want to bring in these immigrants are not actually concerned about the immigrants' well-being. They are people who are about to go on Social Security, themselves, and want it to be kept afloat, whatever becomes of the "Brown people" they want to float it on.