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Donald Trump, who issued a December press release "calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States," said Wednesday such a ban "hasn't been called for yet" and it was "only a suggestion." It's the latest lightning-speed evolution for the real estate tycoon as he pivots from the provocateur who upended the Republican primary to a general election candidate....

Austria’s Social Democratic Chancellor stood down in a shock announcement this morning amid collapsing support for traditional parties in the country, in a move which has been called “a beautiful day for Austria” by his insurgent nationalist opponents. Socialist-left Chancellor Werner Faymann’s Social Democratic Party of Austria failed to even make it to the second round of voting in last month’s presidential elections, as citizens voted overwhelmingly for candidates from alternative political movements. Just one in ten Austrians voted for the party in government. After the count, only Norbert Hofer of the Freedom Party of Austria and Alexander Van der...

U.S. Border Patrol officials are opening up the Texas border to let 4,000 Cubans in, taking about an hour to interview them and check their criminal background, before letting them enter the United States on their own where most will stay for life. Aware that Panama had airlifted nearly 250 of 4,000 Cubans to the Mexican border near El Paso, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency said it stands ready to process the new immigrants with speed, in fact faster it takes many Americans to get a drivers license or buy a gun.

Paul Ryan is not for open borders. In the Year of Donald Trump, these are fighting words. They are also true. On his campaign website, the speaker of the House lists four principles that he believes should guide any attempt to reform our immigration system, among which are: “First, we need to secure the border,” and, “Second, we need to enforce our laws.” Ryan has called illegal immigration “an affront to the rule of law and an unacceptable security risk.” He voted for the “Secure Fence Act of 2006,” which aimed “to establish operational control over the international land and...

Until recently, most people in Europe and the United States-at least, those of us who had grown up and lived our lives as citizens-gave little thought to national immigration policy. Unless you had a vested interest in the issue, either as an immigrant yourself or someone who profited from specific immigration policies, e.g. as an immigration attorney, a member of a group like LULAC, the NCLR, or someone who worked for a VOLAG, the likelihood that this was a galvanizing domestic issue for you would be very slim. However, with the continuing flood of unaccompanied minors across the nation’s southern...

Recently, on the MSNBC "Morning Joe" show, presumptive Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump reiterated his desire to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the United States. Why this fear of Islam and Muslims? Liberal talk show host Bill Maher recently said that the more a person knows about Islam, the more he fears Islam. The essence of Islam is to subjugate, oppress, forcibly convert or kill Kafirs (non-Muslims). This follows from the Islamic scriptures, the Koran, The Hadith (sayings and deeds of Mohammed), and the Sira (the biography of Mohammed). The Koran calls on Muslims to emulate Mohammed: the short paperback...

Donald Trump received more international criticism Tuesday, this time from London's newly elected mayor, Sadiq Khan. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee had suggested Khan would be exempt from his proposed ban on Muslim foreigners entering the United States. But Khan, who is the first Muslim mayor of a major Western capital, wasn't impressed. "Donald Trump's ignorant view of Islam could make both of our countries less safe -- it risks alienating mainstream Muslims around the world and plays into the hands of the extremists," Khan said.

Elected leaders of the city that harbored an illegal alien-turned-killer last year are voting Tuesday on whether to pass an ordinance that would make San Francisco an even more hospitable sanctuary city for illegally present foreign nationals. The Board of Supervisors is considering the measure, which would further tie the hands of local law enforcement, effectively preventing their ability to give an inmate’s personal information or release date to federal immigration officials, according to KQED radio. Supervisor John Avalos introduced the proposed pro-Sanctuary City change.

With the world aflame, it’s only appropriate that our periodical digest of immigration and cultural news returns. Starting off in the States, we find that Michelle Root, after a heartfelt meeting with Donald Trump, has decided to throw her support behind his candidacy. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the case, Michelle is the mother of Sarah Root, who was murdered by a criminal alien that is now at large because of our government’s brilliant oversight of this national disaster. For a good exposition of why Donald Trump is worth supporting, I recommend David Horowitz’s fantastic piece in...

TheThe new Muslim mayor of London has issued a warning to Donald Trump: Moderate your stance on Muslims, or they will launch more attacks against America.

Every four years, there is political chatter about trying to run a third-party candidate who will supposedly be more conservative than the Republican nominee. The lesson is the same every time this is tried: third-party candidates do not win because the United States is a two-party country. The grumblings we hear about Donald Trump are mostly because of his strong stand against illegal immigration. Party bosses know that if Trump wins and then shuts down illegal immigration and so-called free trade, it will cost the Democratic Party millions of future votes and cost Republican businessmen lucrative deals for themselves with...

The Huffington Post has published a photograph (above) of former Mexican president Vicente Fox giving Donald Trump the finger, taken a day before Fox apologized to Trump in an interview with Breitbart News. He also said some of Trump’s proposals could lead to war. “Don’t play around with us,” Fox said. “We can jump walls. We can swim rivers. And we can defend ourselves.”

From 1920 to 2013, 79 million people obtained lawful permanent resident status in the United States. This map visualizes all of them based on their prior country of residence. The brightness of a country corresponds to its total migration to the U.S. at the given time.

... U.S. Customs and Border Patrol statistics show that apprehensions of unaccompanied minors from Central America have spiked to levels near those in the first six months of fiscal year 2014, when the issue became a political football and a source of hysteria for some Americans. According to a recent report by the Pew Research Center, CBP apprehended 27,754 unaccompanied minors on the U.S.-Mexico border during the fist six months of the 2016 fiscal year, which began this past October 1. That's close to the mark reached for the first six months of fiscal year 2014 (28,579) and 78 percent...

Just when you think you’ve heard and seen it all in the Republican campaignathon, along comes prom king Paul Ryan displaying an arrogance that makes Donald Trump look like the Dalai Lama by comparison. Millions of American jaws must have dropped in unison when chameleon Ryan casually told CNN’s Jake Tapper that he’s “just not ready” to support Trump. Really? Where do I even begin to address such a remarkable display of unflinching arrogance? How about just stating the obvious — that the litmus-test conservative crowd still doesn’t get it. That’s right, hard as it is to believe, after ten...

Illegal immigrant households receive an average of $5,692 in federal welfare benefits every year, far more than the average "native" American household, at $4,431, according to a new report on the cost of immigration released Monday. The Center for Immigration Studies, in an analysis of federal cost figures, found that all immigrant-headed households — legal and illegal — receive an average of $6,241 in welfare, 41 percent more than native households. As with Americans receiving benefits such as food stamps and cash, much of the welfare to immigrants supplements their low wage jobs. The total cost is over $103 billion...

How the U.S. can avoid its own version of the fall of the Roman empire That is, are we Americans, citizens of the mightiest empire the world has known since the days of the Caesars, living in the last days of our civilization? Is the United States, like the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century, doomed to collapse from its own decadence? Or can we avoid Rome's fate?

In 1984 a German scholar worked out that 210 reasons had been advocated for the fall of the Roman empire. Peter Jones enjoys a "fine narrative history" that concentrates on just one.Peter Jones reviews and The Fall of the Roman Empire by Peter Heather and The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization by Bryan Ward-PerkinsIn 1984 a German scholar worked out that 210 reasons had been advocated for the fall of the Roman empire in the West in the fifth century AD - from bureaucracy to deforestation, from moral decline to over-hot public baths, from female emancipation to...

Are We Going the Way of Rome? Download PDF There's an old story worth retelling about a band of wild hogs which lived along a river in a secluded area of Georgia. These hogs were a stubborn, ornery, independent bunch. They had survived floods, fires, freezes, droughts, hunters, dogs, and everything else. No one thought they could ever be captured. One day a stranger came into town not far from where the hogs lived and went into the general store. He asked the storekeeper, "Where can I find the hogs? I want to capture them." The storekeeper laughed at such...

The Roman Empire is luxurious but it is filled with misery. It is dying but it laughs – moritur et ridet.                               --- Salvian But Salvian, we learned with a deflecting smile, was an extremist, though, in the hindsight of disaster, his foresight would scarcely seem overstated. What interested me was that men had smiled complacently at Salvian’s words when he spoke them, and men still smiled at them complacently a thousand years later – the same kind of men, I was beginning to suspect,...