Europe follows Germany's lead to impose border controls against ilegals

Hungary has blocked the main crossing point from Serbia used by migrants as Austria, Slovakia and the Netherlands imposed border controls today.  Police closed a gap in the razor-wire barrier along the Hungary-Serbia border as other officers formed a human shield to block off railway tracks.

Meanwhile Hungary's transport authority said it has closed the country's airspace in a 12-mile area along the Serbian border up to a height of 4,500ft.  The moves come after it emerged that Hungary was bracing itself for a massive surge of up to 30,000 migrants in just one day.

A record 5,809 migrants entered Hungary in a new surge on Sunday, smashing the previous day's record of 4,330, Hungarian police have revealed.

The sharp increase came ahead of laws coming into force tomorrow under which people entering the EU country illegally can be jailed.

Germany, Slovakia and Austria have started to impose border controls in a bid to control the flow of migrants through Europe

Index.hu reported that Hungary's neighbour Serbia would try to 'push through' as many as 30,000 migrants on Monday before the new Hungarian laws come in to force. Hungarian official sources are quoted as saying Serbia would speed up the provision of buses for the migrants, who enter Serbia from Macedonia after leaving Greece.

Meanwhile, European Union members are on collision course today over proposals to distribute asylum-seekers across the continent - a plan backed by safe-haven Germany but resisted by several states in the east.

Once in Hungary, most migrants seek to travel onto western Europe, particularly to Germany and Sweden, via Austria.

But with tens of thousands crossing its frontiers, German authorities on Sunday decided to reinstate border controls, and all trains between Austria and Germany were temporarily suspended, leaving thousands effectively stranded in Austria.

This morning, Germany's Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel said the country may take in one million refugees this year, up from the record 800,000 arrivals predicted so far.

SOURCE

**************************

America for Americans: No Apology Necessary

Regarding immigration, the selling out of the American public now has a first-person account attached to it. In a scathing column, a pseudonym-bearing “Displaced Disney Cast Member” describes the despicable efforts of a once-iconic company to replace American workers with foreigners willing to work for lower pay. The author of the column is hardly an anomaly. Americans are not only losing their jobs to foreign replacements, they are underwriting both legal and illegal immigrants accessing America’s safety net.

“I used to have a dream career at one of America’s most iconic and admired companies,” the former employee writes. “Twenty years of hard work, technical skill building, the fostering of relationships and a bachelor’s degree in Information Technology guided me to a coveted position as an Information Technology Engineer for Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida.”

Those 20 years of hard work essentially meant nothing, however, and the day that employee learned his fate was only 10 days after “Bob Iger, CEO of Disney, had just announced that the company’s earnings were up well over 20 percent for the quarter and this was just one among a long series of record breaking financial results for the company.” When the employee arrived at work the message he got was both devastating and infuriating. A “grim faced Disney Executive” told everyone in the room they would be losing their jobs within the next 90 days, with a final termination date of Jan. 30, 2015.

Why? Because their jobs had been given to a “foreign workforce.” Then came the ultimate insult. The executive told them, “In the meantime you will be training your replacements until your jobs are 100 percent transferred over to them and if you don’t cooperate you will not receive any severance pay.”

Thus the soon-to-be ex-employee was forced to endure the “disgraceful and demoralizing” experience of training his replacement. Adding insult to injury, this worker and his fellow former employees were “informed by several large IT recruiting firms that Disney has a policy in place that states all displaced Disney IT Cast Members will not even be considered as contractor workers for 12 months. Thus we have been essentially shut out and black listed by the largest employer in this very small Orlando job market.”

Disney and countless other companies have brought in foreign workers courtesy of the H-1B visa program. In March, the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings on the abuses of that program, including expert testimony from Howard University’s Ron Hira and Rutgers' Hal Salzman, who told lawmakers the current system “has become primarily a process for supplying lower-cost labor to the IT industry.”

What did the Senate do about the problem? Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), along with co-sponsors Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ), proposed a reincarnation of the 2013 “I-Squared” bill called the “Immigration Innovation Act of 2015.” Like its predecessor, the new act would increase the number of H-1B visas from the current level of 65,000 a year, plus 20,000 for holders of U.S. graduate degrees, to a whopping 115,000, “with the possibility of the cap rising as high as 195,000 depending on economic conditions,” Hatch said in April. Like many of his GOP and Democrat colleagues, Hatch has sold his soul to tech industry giants such as Qualcomm and Microsoft, which have laid off thousands of American workers even as they demand an increase in the number of H-1B visas. IBM, Amazon, Intel, Google and Oracle have also told Congress such visas are necessary because there is a shortage of skilled American workers.

This writer did a previous report on the subject. Those allegations are abject lies.

Regardless, the onslaught continues. A report from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) released in June 2014 revealed that over the last 15 years all net job gains in the nation have gone to legal and illegal immigrants. And lest anyone think the trend is changing or leveling out in some respect, think again: A jobs chart posted by the website Zero Hedge reveals a damming reality contained in latest jobs report covering the month of August. It shows that a sky-high 698,000 native-born Americans lost their jobs last month — even as 204,000 foreign-born Americans got one.

As bad as that is, at least those immigrants are working. In another damning report released this month, CIS reveals that 2012 data show a whopping “51 percent of households headed by an immigrant (legal or illegal) reported that they used at least one welfare program during the year, compared to 30 percent of native households.”

Welfare usage by immigrants is not uniform. The report states, “Households headed by immigrants from Central America and Mexico (73 percent), the Caribbean (51 percent), and Africa (48 percent) have the highest overall welfare use. Those from East Asia (32 percent), Europe (26 percent), and South Asia (17 percent) have the lowest.”

If the words “Central America” have a familiar ring, maybe it’s because the Obama administration is actively recruiting “refugees” from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras — officially known as Central American Minors (CAM). A program initiated by the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department is providing these illegal aliens “with a safe, legal, and orderly alternative to the dangerous journey that some children are undertaking to the United States,” according to a DHS memo obtained by Judicial Watch. Once here, those children will be united with family members who may also be illegal aliens, benefiting from Obama’s amnesty or deferred action programs. In other words, the administration is actively adding to the number of illegals already in the nation. Illegals who already have and will continue to compete with Americans for jobs — when they’re not accessing taxpayer-funded entitlement programs.

Perhaps the only thing more maddening than the facts presented here is the contemptible notion pushed by the Obama administration, Democrats, establishment GOPers, pro-amnesty activists and a thoroughly corrupt media that any resistance to this agenda by native-born Americans is tantamount to bigotry, nativism and xenophobia. Don’t believe it for a second. There is nothing remotely wrong with the desire to preserve the nation’s borders, culture, language and traditions, better known as American exceptionalism. In fact, if anyone owes this nation an abject apology, it is those who would seek to undermine that exceptionalism for cheap labor and easy votes, even as they drape themselves in an aura of multicultural self-aggrandizement that is nothing less than an effort to marginalize our national identity. This is one American who will never apologize for desiring a nation that caters primarily — and overwhelmingly — to Americans. Neither should anyone else.

SOURCE

***************************

U.S. Has Less Economic Freedom than Chile, Jordan, or Taiwan

Today the Fraser Institute in Vancouver, Canada, released the 2015 Economic Freedom of the World report (pdf) and it’s bad news for the United States, where economic freedom is falling. The U.S. ranks only 16th in economic freedom trailing Chile, Jordan, and Taiwan.

The EFW report measures the level of economic freedom in 157 countries by gathering country-specific data on 42 distinct variables in five broad categories: (1) size of government, i.e., taxes and spending; (2) legal structure and security of property rights; (3) access to sound money; (4) freedom to trade internationally; and (5) regulation of credit, labor, and business.

Researchers James Gwartney, Robert Lawson, and Joshua Hall crunched the numbers (here is the master data file) and found that Hong Kong and Singapore once again occupy the top two positions. The other nations in the top 10 are New Zealand, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates, Mauritius, Jordan, Ireland, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Venezuela is in last place.

A 16th-place ranking might not sound bad, but the U.S. once ranked 2nd and has trended downward consistently since 2000. The EFW report concludes: “Nowhere has the reversal of the rising [global] trend in economic freedom been more evident than in the United States.”

Today Chile, Georgia, Jordan, Qatar, and Taiwan have more economic freedom than the United States. The U.S. is now only slightly ahead of Armenia and Romania.

SOURCE

***************************

Donald Trump strikes a chord — with evangelicals

Like most things about Donald Trump, his religion does not fit neatly into political tradition.

Trump says he can’t remember ever asking God for forgiveness for anything. If he has a favorite Bible verse, he refuses to name it. He has downplayed the importance of Holy Communion, flippantly saying, “I drink the little wine, which is about the only wine I drink, and I eat the little cracker.”

He does, at least sometimes, attend church; the Presbyterian church in Manhattan where Trump married his first wife is where he struck up a romance with the woman who would become his second wife.

And yet polls show the thrice-married longtime casino magnate who once posed on the cover of Playboy magazine with a lightly clothed woman is winning the backing of conservative evangelical voters in the GOP presidential primary.

National polls show him trouncing candidates who have much more actively courted Christian voters — such as Mike Huckabee, an ordained Southern Baptist preacher, Rick Santorum, who frequently evokes the Bible, and Ted Cruz, a preacher’s son who announced his campaign on the campus of Liberty University.

Why is Trump so attractive to conservative Christians? “Here’s a guy who is out there unfettered by the political correctness,” said Tony Perkins, who has not endorsed anyone and is president of the Family Research Council, a Washington conservative Christian organization. “He’s not afraid to say what he thinks. That’s attractive.”

In a national poll of Republicans, 32 percent of white evangelicals said they would vote for Trump. Carson was second, with 28 percent, according to the CNN poll released Thursday, with no other candidate even in double digits.

A Washington Post-ABC News poll released Monday showed that Trump’s numbers are better among white evangelicals than almost any other subgroup of voters. In the survey — which also showed Trump surging among voters overall — 54 percent of evangelicals support him on immigration, 62 percent think he is qualified to be president, and 50 percent think he is honest and trustworthy.

The Post-ABC poll found Trump to be the favorite of 33 percent of registered Republicans and Republican-leaning independents overall.

Starting in 2011, when Trump was weighing whether to run for president in 2012, he began talking more openly about his faith, mostly in a series of interviews with the Christian Broadcasting Network. He also cultivated a relationship with Franklin Graham, the son of evangelist Billy Graham, and nearly two years ago attended Billy Graham’s 95th birthday party in Asheville, N.C.

As an adult, Trump began attending Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan, and it became the place for major family events. It’s where he was married to Ivana in 1977, where his sister was married, and where funerals for Trump’s father and mother were held.

“Believe me, if I run and I win,” Trump told the Christian Broadcasting Network in 2015, “I will be the greatest representative of the Christians that they’ve had in a long time.”

More HERE

******************************

For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

****************************