Book review:
OPEN BORDERS INC.:
Who’s Funding America’s Destruction?
By Michelle Malkin
Regnery Publishing, 2019
468+xliv pp., $28.99 hardcover
It really is a felony, as Michelle Malkin reminds readers in her latest, well-researched book,
to knowingly bring or attempt to bring aliens across the border illegally; to knowingly conceal, harbor, or shield them from detection in reckless disregard for the law; and to engage in any conspiracy or to aid and abet such acts. (Title 8 U.S. Code Section 1324)
But it is not merely the impunity enjoyed by countless individuals and private groups pushing for open borders that makes this easy to forget; it is above all the U.S. government’s active disregard for its own laws. And if you pay taxes, your money is making this lawlessness possible.
The Federal Reserve runs a remittance service called Directo a México and promotes it in collaboration with the Institute for Mexicans Abroad, an agency of Mexico’s Foreign Ministry. By 2010, more than four hundred banks and credit unions had signed up for Directo a México. Any illegal worker in the U.S. can get an account at such a bank by means of an “individual taxpayer number” issued by the IRS itself. Both the Fed and the IRS are thus openly in violation of the law against aiding illegal aliens.
The judicial branch has displayed particular effrontery in thwarting immigration enforcement. Malkin writes:
Individual federal judges have created a First Amendment right for anyone in the world to immigrate here, turned illegal aliens into a protected class vested with constitutional rights even American citizens don’t have, and thrown immigration statutes that have been on the books for more than a century under the bus.
One judge has actually been indicted for helping a twice-deported illegal wanted on narcotics charges slip out the back door to avoid ICE agents.
A Massachusetts District Attorney ordered employees of her office “immediately to notify me” about any “immigration authorities apprehending or questioning parties scheduled to appear in court about residency status” at any courthouse. (This is sometimes done because courthouses are protected with metal detectors.) She warned: “our office will begin to factor into all charging and sentencing decisions the potential of immigration consequences.”
West African migrant Bampumim Teixeira had immigration consequences factored into his sentencing when he was given 364 days for robbing two banks. Federal law, you see, requires sentences of at least one year to trigger deportation proceedings. Mr. Teixeira served nine months before being released to commit a double homicide. As Malkin asks: “Why shouldn’t immigration outlaws who compound their illegal status by committing even more crimes face ‘immigration consequences’ for every single civil and criminal law they break?”
There are currently 564 “sanctuary jurisdictions” in the United States which refuse to cooperate with federal immigration authorities. They include seven states—California, Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Mexico, Oregon, and Vermont—as well as such cities as New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Seattle, and New Orleans. Between 2014 and 2017, about ten thousand criminal aliens were released into sanctuary jurisdictions only to be arrested for new crimes. Six federal courts ruled against Trump White House initiatives to punish federal sanctuary jurisdictions in 2017 alone.
The detention facilities for illegal entrant minors that have recently received so much attention are also overwhelmingly government funded. They grew out of a 1997 class-action settlement between open borders groups and the Clinton administration known as Flores v. Reno. Under the settlement, the government agreed to provide child illegal entrants with
food, clothing, personal grooming items, medical and dental care, academic classes, appropriate reading material in languages other than English, at least one hour a day of large muscle activity, structured leisure time activities, social work, group counseling, access to religious services of the minor’s choice, legal services information regarding the availability of free legal assistance, the right to be represented by council, the right to a deportation or exclusion hearing and the right to apply for political asylum.
It is these full-service taxpayer-sponsored shelters for juvenile invaders that are now being likened to concentration camps. A network of some 100 of them spread across 17 states has provided care for over 34,000 children at an average daily cost to the taxpayer of about $700 per child. They have proven a magnet for illegals, who see them as a way of obtaining free care and schooling for their children with little risk of deportation. As former Acting DHS secretary Kevin McAleenan noted, the Flores settlement “has been the essential driver for the increase in family units” entering the country illegally.
Humanitarianism is a two-edged sword. The “concern for children” that inspired Flores has provided incentives for thousands of Latin Americans to endanger their children by transporting them—or, worse, having them transported by professional smugglers—through hundreds of miles of unforgiving desert terrain. The drug cartels which control these areas charge $1,000-$1,500 per person for passage, and failure to pay can mean death for both smuggler and migrant. U.S. authorities sometimes find these children in an appalling state. Although detention facilities provide what emergency medical assistance they can, the frequent end result is another “child death in ICE custody,” so publicized to create the impression our agents are akin to Nazi thugs.
The recent Central American caravans to America’s Southern border have been portrayed as a spontaneous response to “violence” in the region, but a survey of 3,200 Guatemalans found only 0.3 percent citing violence at home as their motive for participating; 91 percent admit their primary concerns are economic. The caravans were organized by a group called Pueblo Sin Fronteras, run by a Mexican-American dual national. A press release issued in the group’s name absurdly stated: “We demand of Mexico and the United States that they open the borders to us because we are as much citizens as the people of the countries where we are and/or travel.” Many participants were falsely told the UN would be taking care of them on arrival in the U.S.
Men of God Doing the Devil’s Work
Not only your taxes, but also the money you may have put in the church collection plate, are being used to fund your dispossession. America’s 72 million Catholics collectively contribute around $11.9 billion per year to their parishes, yet, as Malkin writes, they are generally “left in the dark about how their donations are enabling human trafficking, violent crime, and exploitation of cheap, illegal alien labor in America.” The Church has been a major funder of the Central American caravans, financing shelters all along the route in Mexico.
The activities of the Catholic Legal Immigration Network Inc. (CLINIC) cover every possible aspect of resistance to immigration enforcement, from political advocacy to grant-making, training activist lawyers, and filing “upward of 250,000 applications, petitions, motions, and waivers on behalf of aliens.” CLINIC has teamed up with the Southern Poverty Law Center to sue the Trump administration over its detention policies involving minors. Last March they joined other Catholic organizations in filing a friend-of-the-court brief with the Supreme Court, arguing that all foreign Muslims have First Amendment rights (!) to emigrate to America and practice their religion here.
The Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD) was founded in 1969 as a permanent funding mechanism for the Industrial Areas Foundation, a joint project of Chicago Bishop Bernard J. Sheil and Saul Alinsky meant to train community organizers for “social change.” Nowadays, CCHD grants money to organizations with names like Latinos United for a New America, Justice Overcoming Boundaries, and Immigrant Worker Project. They funded ACORN before its dissolution in the wake of James O’Keefe’s expose, and spent $3.5 million promoting amnesty in 2013. Barack Obama once ran a CCHD-funded outfit in Chicago. All this subversive activity is supposedly meant “to put Catholic teaching on immigration into practice.” Yet as Malkin points out, the Catechism of the Catholic Church states that immigrants “are obliged to respect with gratitude the material and spiritual heritage of the country that receives them, to obey its laws, and to assist in carrying civic burdens.”
Six of the nine voluntary agencies resettling “refugees” in America are religious in nature. In order of annual revenue, they are:
Catholic Charities/US Conference of Catholic Bishops: $742.6 million
Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services: $471.6 million
Church World Services: $433.3 Million
World Relief: $416.1 Million
Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society: $186.1 million
Episcopal Migration Ministries: $146.7 million
The work these agencies do is not charitable; they are paid for everyone they settle. There used to be a program under which the agencies could settled refugees at their own expense, but it was canceled in the mid-1990s for lack of use.
Most “refugees” are chosen by the UN, which acknowledges that few of them are in immediate danger. Little can be done to verify their stories, and some get into the program by paying bribes to UN agents.
Nearly half of resettlement costs are spent on welfare. Some Muslim preachers encourage their migrant flock to make use of welfare, so that they may devote their time to destroying their host countries rather than supporting their families. Malkin lists sixty Muslim “refugees” who have gone on to wage Holy War against America; she calls them refujihadis. After four months, settlement agencies bear no responsibility for their behavior.
The Soros Network
The “mastermind of mass-migration chaos” and “central financier of Open Borders Inc.” is, of course, George Soros. The man behind Open Society Foundations (OSF; formerly the Open Society Institute) dismisses national sovereignty as “an anachronistic concept originating in bygone times,” and seeks to replace it with a global system of political decision-making. He promotes this goal through donations to “a bewildering array of ‘dark money’ groups that shield donors and key data.” This allows him to deny direct involvement in any illegal or unpopular activity.
OSF officials have stated, e.g., that they “do not fund search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean.” But that is exactly what their grantees have been doing. A vessel operated by Save the Children has been caught in Libyan territorial waters picking up perfectly robust adults on behalf of human traffickers who charge them a thousand dollars per person. Doctors Without Borders maintained no fewer than five such vessels during the period 2015-18, playing into the hands of criminal smugglers and encouraging people to risk their lives at sea.
Soros’s network was an important force lobbying for the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, a non-binding treaty Malkin characterizes as a “founding document of Open Borders Inc.” It was endorsed by the UN General Assembly over American objections in December 2018 by a vote of 152-5.
OSF frames all opposition to mass migration as bigotry. They were a major sponsor of the Rome Charter which provides “guidelines” to journalists reporting on immigration (telling them, e.g., to avoid such “stigmatizing” words as invasion or clandestine—regardless of their accuracy). Italian journalists are sanctioned for violations. Greece, Spain, and Bulgaria are now working on similar codes.
Among Soros’s most important partners is the British-based foundation HOPE not Hate, which Malkin calls “the brass knuckles of the global speech police.” They have successfully gotten scores of publications banned from Amazon and British bookstores. One disgusted former operative says the group has “used every dirty, underhanded, low-down, unscrupulous trick in the book.” This has included surreptitiously filming dissidents, as well as getting them dropped from Facebook and similar platforms. In 2016, one member of the HOPE not Hate leadership team tweeted out “And now for some good news…” along with a link to a Washington Post piece headlined “White Christian America Is Dying.” No hate here!
Last year OSF more than doubled their grants to migration-related projects to $63.3 million. They are even paying gangs of illegal aliens to go about with signs reading “F#$K TRUMP” and “OPEN BORDERS.” Critics are routinely met with cries of anti-Semitism, whether they mention Soros’s ethnicity or not. Hungary is one country that refuses to be intimidated; they recently outlawed Soros-funded organizations for facilitating fraudulent asylum claims in their country. As Malkin writes: “This is not antisemitism. This is what a country looks like when it is serious about enforcing its laws against aiding and abetting illegal immigration!”
The $outhern Poverty Law Center
The longest chapter of Open Borders Inc. is devoted to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), detailing its smear techniques as well as the recent scandal which finally took down founder Morris Dees. But even more interesting is the account of the prominent American corporations in bed with this sinister organization. Apple gave them a cool million, and Google actually reimburses its employees for “volunteering” with them.
Google/YouTube has designated the SPLC a “trusted flagger” of impermissible content, and Facebook lists them as one of the “external experts and organizations” they call upon “to inform our hate speech policies.” Twitter calls the organization a “safety partner” working to combat “hateful conduct and harassment,” and the SPLC has boasted that Twitter’s December 2017 “crackdown on hate groups and extremist rhetoric” came in response to its own pressure. Leftists still get away with advocating violence on the popular platform.
PayPal CEO Dan Schulman claims his company consults with outside groups on both the “right and the left” before deciding whose accounts to terminate, but the SPLC is the only group he will mention by name. Journalist Luke Rohlfing was suspended from PayPal for exposing how the company had helped Pueblo Sin Fronteras raise money for its caravan (in violation of PayPal’s own rules against using the platform for illegal activities).
Amazon sponsors a program allowing customers to donate 0.5 percent of the value of their purchases to a charity of their choice. They rely on the SPLC to tell them which charities to exclude because, in the words of a company spokeswoman, “we don’t want to be biased whatsoever.” And nothing bespeaks neutral objectivity like the SPLC’s campaign to destroy its self-designated enemies.
As Malkin notes, none of this censorship and bullying is “about transparency or trust or safety…. It’s all about control.” Her book is co-dedicated to “my patriotic friends and allies dwelling in the Valley of the Banned.” All of us in that Valley, and in the Historic American Nation, owe her a debt.