Free Republic

On November 5, the White House released the text of the 5,544 page Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) that President Obama had just finished negotiating under the FastTrack authority that Congress gave him. That trade pact can no longer be amended. The up-or-down votes in the House and Senate will take place as early as January 2016. So what’s in the TPP? Here’s a quick summary: A legislative body superior to CongressA vehicle to pass Obama’s climate change treatyIncreased legal immigrationReduced patent protection for U.S. pharmaceuticalsQuotas on U.S. agricultural exportsIncreased currency manipulationReduced U.S. power That’s the summary. Here are the details....

At a guess, I spoke last week with a couple of hundred Syrian refugees who are among the four million registered with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refuges. I asked everyone I talked to about what they knew about Canada. About half of them were aware that it was cold there. The same number knew that Christians lived there. Almost nobody could tell me where Canada was, except that is was far away. Canada’s refugees are being drawn from a pool of the poorest of the poor. The prospective settlers whom I met in Lebanon and during previous visits...

As I argued in Faithless Execution, the principal constitutional duty of the chief executive is to execute the laws faithfully. President Obama, by contrast, sees his principal task as imposing his post-American "progressive" preferences, regardless of what the laws mandate. In his latest harangue against Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas) and other Americans opposed to his insistence on continuing to import thousands of Muslim refugees from Syria and other parts of the jihad-ravaged Middle East, Obama declaimed: When I hear political leaders suggesting that there would be a religious test for which a person who's fleeing from a war-torn country...

McDonald’s settled a lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice. According to a DOJ statement, McDonalds and its affiliates and subsidiaries thus resolved allegations that the corporation had discriminated illegally against immigrant employees at corporate-owned restaurants. In a press release, DOJ declared, “…the anti-discrimination provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) prohibits employers from placing additional documentary burdens on work-authorized employees during the employment eligibility verification process because of their citizenship or immigration status.”   The Office of Special Counsel for Immigration-Related Unfair Employment Practices (OSC) at DOJ initiated its investigation after it had received information on its worker...

Could Obama at least share the names of the refugees? Is that really too much to ask? Have any reporters even thought of asking? It would be pathetic and embarrassing if he wouldn't or couldn't.

Everywhere I turn the talk is about the Syrian refugees and why we should take them or why we shouldn't. What I'm not hearing is much common sense or Christian charity. Why all the idiocy about the refugee crisis? I'm talking about the stupidity and lack of common sense by those who want to throw open our borders and those who want to refuse entry to all refugees. On the one hand, Christian charity demands that we welcome the stranger and give solace to the homeless where we are able. We are the richest and most prosperous and bountiful country...

People observe a minute of silence at the Trocadero in Paris Nov. 16. (CNS photo/Philippe Wojazer, Reuters) Of all the commentaries on the Paris massacres I’ve read, the one that seems most perceptive is a piece by Judith Bergman for the Gatestone Institute titled “How Can Anyone Be Shocked?” Indeed. The attacks had all the inevitability of a Greek tragedy: they were entirely predictable. Nevertheless many reacted with “shock,” including Angela Merkel, David Cameron, and the Vatican. As Bergman writes: After 9/11 in the United States; the 2004 Madrid train bombings, which killed nearly 200 and wounded 2,000; and...

The current proposal being considered in the House of Representatives in response to the president’s dangerous refugee plan — the American SAFE Act — fails to defend the interests of the American people. It is based on a flawed premise, as there is simply no way to vet Syrian refugees. Just over a month ago, officials from the Department of Homeland Security admitted before the Immigration Subcommittee that there is no database in Syria against which they can run a check. They have no way to enter Syria to verify the applicants’ personal information. And we know the region is...

Two separate reports of groups of America-bound Syrians detained below the U.S. southern border and the arrests of six other Middle Eastern men nabbed with smugglers in Arizona in recent days are raising concerns that Islamic State militants could be probing security – and stoking fears some may already be here. {exert}

It's official! Sen. Ted Cruz's immigration plan trumps Trump's! I expected that the unveiling of his plan would take a back seat to the Islamic terrorist attack in Paris, France, and rightfully so. However, in lieu of the chaos, presidents will be forced to make many decisions during their tenure that will affect the safety and security of the American people. The Paris attack gave us a chance to see how our candidates would respond if an event like that occured during their administration. In a world with an ever increasing threat of an ISIS attack, immigration is no longer...

In addition to direct federal grants to help refugees, government at various levels provide subsidized housing, healthcare, food stamps, other cash assistance, and free education. There is also a cost to the criminal justice system of taking care of the criminals among them. It’s the Catholic role, in collaboration with the federal government, in bringing refugees to the U.S. that caused Corcoran to leave the church. She told Accuracy in Media, “In 2002, having been raised in a protestant faith, I became a Catholic. For a few years I loved being a Catholic. All of that changed beginning in 2007...

Migration of Mexicans to the U.S. has plunged to a net negative for the first time since the 1940s, bringing down the curtain on the largest wave of immigration in modern American history, according to a new study. The Pew Research Center found that more Mexicans have been leaving America to return to their home country in recent years than arriving in the U.S. It based the study on an analysis of U.S. and Mexican government data. Mexican migration has been falling for some time. But the Pew figures released Thursday suggest that the surge in legal and illegal Mexican...

Once upon a time, there was a safe welfare state called Sweden, where people rarely locked their doors. Now, this country is a night-watchman state -- each man is on his own. When the Minister of Justice, Morgan Johansson, encourages breaking the law, it means opening the gates to anarchy. Mr. and Mrs. Swede have every reason to be worried, with the influx of 190,000 unskilled and unemployed migrants expected this year -- equivalent to 2% of Sweden's current population. The number is as if 6.4 million penniless migrants who did not speak English arrived in U.S. in one year,...

Suffering, perhaps temporarily, the setback of an injunction against executive amnesty; the administration is moving full speed ahead with its plans for refugees. Who knows what the actual intake will be before this is all done but missing from the equation is the untold number that will also arrive, subsequently, as derivative beneficiaries of those granted status (see here: http://www.uscis.gov/i-730). Unlike the folks entering across the southern border, refugees, once they’ve been admitted into the country and have stayed for a year, automatically qualify to adjust status to become permanent residents. From this point on, they are on a glide...

Obama's veto tested

Rand Paul appeared on Mark Levin's radio show Tuesday evening to share his thoughts on the refugee crisis and the lack of vetting of Muslim refugees arriving in America. The conservative, libertarian senator had some other things to say, especially about Marco Rubio. Rubio has always supported an open-borders policy and was part of the Gang of 8, the group of senators that tried to pass amnesty for illegal aliens and would have opened the floodgates to Islamic refugees. Last week Senator Ted Cruz blasted Rubio, saying the Floridian had voted against every single amendment conservatives put forth to the...

Many people believe that it's time to start refusing refugees from Syria and Iraq, as we are incapable of determining if terrorists are hiding among them. But another group of immigrants poses a serious security threat that is going ignored: Somalis. Somalia has been partially overrun by Al-Shabaab, an organization that shares ISIS's radical views, goals, and strategies. It frequently publishes videos and photos of executions of "unbelievers" or people suspected of working for the Somali authorities. According to Refugee Settlement Watch, a total of 100,000 Somali refugees have come to the United States in recent years -- 8,858 of...

NEW DELHI - In early September, media reported, citing an unnamed ISIL operative, that an estimated 4,000 covert ISIL terrorists had arrived to Europe disguised as refugees. "Among the refugees, who went to Europe, maybe more than 20 percent belong to ISIL groups. Now Europe has received bad element into their ground. They will face further problem in future," Riad Abbas said, commenting on recent deadly terrorist acts in Paris on November 13. According to the diplomat, terrorism has penetrated everywhere in Europe....

The first stated purpose of the U.S. Constitution is "to form a more perfect Union." Allowing immigrants into this country when their religion/political ideology is completely hostile to, and incompatible with, the principles upon which American republican self-government is premised makes that first stated purpose totally impossible of fulfillment. As has been stated, correctly, so many times, the Constitution is not a suicide pact.

When my newlywed wife and I took a bus from Istanbul to Munich in 1972, we were surprised to see that almost all of our fellow travelers were Turkish workmen. We discovered that Germans were looking for cheap labor, and the Turks were filling these spots. We were young, naïve, and liberal, and we felt that the Germans were doing a good thing. We didn't stop to think how these Muslim fundamentalists would fit in with modern Munich. This was a couple of months before the Palestinians massacred the Israeli Olympic team. The workers on our bus were not Palestinians....