Tag Archives: #Immigration

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“Now, only the best will drive”

In the aftermath of two illegal immigrants causing fatal accidents while driving tractor-trailers, there are a lot of stories, mostly in social media, about increased federal commercial driving regulation enforcement, particularly along Interstate 40 through Oklahoma. Drivers are being tested for the ability to read English, which is mandatory for holders of commercial driver’s licenses (CDL). It’s not just road signs, but the driver must be able to read manifests and the material warning data on potentially hazardous loads.

I’m old enough to remember the publicity when the federal government mandated CDLs to drive certain vehicles. “Now, only the best will drive” was the slogan. At the time, I had what was called a chauffer’s license in Virginia, and I occasionally drove dump trucks. The company for which I worked brought in all of the drivers one Saturday morning, to take the CDL written test, with their road tests grandfathered. I didn’t bother because we had a concrete pour out of the plant in Newport News Shipbuilding, I was doing the quality control work, and I hadn’t driven a truck in a while. I never bothered with getting my CDL because I didn’t really want to drive anyway.

That the fee for the CDL was $40.00, while a regular operator’s license was just $5.00 might have had a little bit to do with it as well.

Now, “only the best will drive” means that commercial drivers have to meet qualifications. They’re getting tested for English proficiency by being asked to read a passage out of a children’s book; it’s not quantum physics. They’re being pulled for wearing flip-flops, when regulations require full shoes while driving, supposedly because sandals can slip off your feet and get caught under the pedals. That one seems silly to me, but it’s still the rule, and virtually every truck has air conditioning these days, so it’s not as though the driver’s feet will get too hot.

I particularly liked this one:

He’d driven trucks for fifteen solid years, mastering every highway curve and weather condition. At a weigh station stop, an officer slid a simple kids’ book across the counter: “Read this.” The words blurred, the sentences tangled; he couldn’t. License gone in an instant. After all those miles, it wasn’t the road that ended his career—it was the system.

Say what? The driver had, allegedly, been driving here for “fifteen solid years” and he still hadn’t mastered enough English to read a passage from The Cat In The Hat?

A lot of the stuff on Facebook pictures drivers who are Sikh or Indian, and there’s no way to tell if the driver pictured is the one who lost his CDL on the spot, but it’s important to know that the story is real, even if the social media picture is possibly faked.

US bars 7,200 truck drivers for failing English tests, Indian-origin truckers hit hard

US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced the crackdown on October 30. It comes close in the heels of a crash involving an Indian-origin truck driver

Written by Manraj Grewal Sharma | Updated: All Soul’s Day, November 2, 2025 | 03:11 PM IST

More than 7,200 commercial truck drivers have been disqualified across the United States this year after failing mandatory English proficiency tests, in an aggressive enforcement campaign by the US Department of Transportation (DOT) after a series of fatal highway incidents involving Indian-origin drivers.

The North American Punjabi Truckers Association estimates that 130,000–150,000 truck drivers work in the US, coming directly from Punjab and Haryana due to established recruitment networks, and many of them have been impacted.

Announcing the crackdown on October 30, US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy confirmed that 7,248 drivers were declared “out of service”—effectively debarred from driving—in 2025 for failing real-time roadside English Language Proficiency (ELP) checks. The figure, drawn from real-time data in the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s (FMCSA) national inspection database, marks a dramatic jump from roughly 1,500 such debarment orders until July 2025.

The move comes in the wake of several high-profile accidents, including a devastating pileup on a California highway in October involving an Indian driver accused of killing three Americans. According to Department of Transportation (DOT) sources, the driver, an illegal alien who was able to secure a California Commercial Driver’s License (CDL), failed the English test multiple times before the incident. DOT officials allege that the state’s lax adoption of Trump-era language rules enabled the tragedy, with Secretary Duffy publicly criticizing “sanctuary states” like California for flouting new federal guidance.

In another case earlier in August, Indian national Harjinder Singh was involved in a deadly triple-fatality on the Florida Turnpike despite questionable English language proficiency credentials, according to safety records. Both cases have intensified scrutiny of Commercial Driver’s License issuance practices, especially toward non-domiciled drivers from India and other South Asian countries, a demographic increasingly prominent in US trucking owing to persistent driver shortages.

When trucking companies can pay non-citizen drivers 52¢ a mile and get haulers, many don’t want to pay 75¢ or 80¢ to get a real American citizen who can read Green Eggs and Ham.

And here’s the money line:

The revived rule, 49 CFR 391.11(b)(2), requires all Commercial Driver’s License holders to read and speak English well enough to converse with the public, understand signs, communicate with officials, and maintain accurate reports. Enforcement was relaxed under an Obama administration memo, which since 2016 had discouraged inspectors from removing drivers solely for English language proficiency (ELP) deficiencies. This changed after President Trump’s 2025 executive order and a series of directives by the transportation department mandating immediate debarment for failing English language tests as of June 25, 2025.

In other words, the two fatal accidents reported in the article can be directly traced to the feet of Barack Hussein Obama! It’s not that immigrants are doing the jobs that Americans won’t do, but that immigrants are doing the jobs that Americans won’t do for 52¢ a mile. And when CDLs are being issued to “non-domiciled” drivers — meaning: drivers with no home address, drivers basically living in their trucks — those “non-domiciled drivers” can afford to work for 52¢ per mile, because they aren’t paying for a house and wife and kids.

It makes me wonder: how many “non-domiciled drivers,” men living in the sleeper cabs of their trucks, having little better to do, are maintaining separate logbooks to conceal how many hours they’re driving?

This is not to say that real American truck drivers don’t have accidents; they absolutely do. If there are any statistics showing a difference in accident rates between citizen and non-citizen drivers, I have not found them. But Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy noted that several states, including California, were improperly issuing CDLs to non-domiciled drivers and was working to get the practice within regulations.

It’s worth noting that the previous Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg, whom Vice President Kamala Harris Emhoff wanted as her 2024 running mate, but decided against it because he is openly homosexual, and who has aspirations of running for President in 2028, did not take any actions to get unqualified drivers off the roads.

Will this cost consumers? Yes, it will, but perhaps not that much. The difference between 50¢ a mile and 75¢ a mile, over a 1,000-mile delivery — and most are less than 1,000 miles — is an extra $250.00 for the driver, but if he’s hauling 50,000 lb, is only ½¢ a pound. Using some rough measurements, a 53 ft trailer, loaded to the max with toilet paper, not exactly a heavy load, could carry 15,500 rolls of TP, so $250 extra for the driver would add 6.45¢ to the cost of a four-roll pack, over that same 1,000-mile delivery. That, to me, is worth getting unqualified drivers, especially illegal immigrant drivers off the road. When they find that they can’t work anywhere, they’ll eventually head back to India, or Mexico, of from wherever else it is they come.

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Our defenders of democracy really don’t like it when the people take democratic choices of which they disapprove

Sometimes an author spends a lot of time, finely crafting his OpEd for The Philadelphia Inquirer, and winds up telling us exactly what he didn’t really mean to convey.

On immigration, Trump doesn’t have a copyright on cruelty

On both sides of the Atlantic, migrants are regarded as a problem at best, a danger to national security at worst, writes German journalist Adrian Schulz.

by Adrian Schulz | Tuesday, September 2, 2025 | 6:00 AM EDT

Detention camps, violent rhetoric, physical harm, deportations to third-party countries under brutal regimes — Donald Trump did not invent the playbook on callousness toward immigrants.

The European Union, winner of the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize, got there ahead of him.

As I read the news about the U.S. government’s continuing assault on people whose sole fault is not having the right documents to legally live in a country that is otherwise happy to exploit their labor, I also follow the German debate around the 10th anniversary of the so-called refugee crisis. In 2015, more than a million people came to Germany seeking refuge, many of them fleeing from war-torn Syria.

“(N)ot having the right documents,” huh? Yet another euphemism for being in the country illegally!

I cannot speak to European law, but “not having the right documents” is not their “sole fault” in the United States, because to work in the United States you must be a citizen or be here legally, with the appropriate documents. This means that the illegals who work have either presented forged documents, or be working for a company which has knowingly hired them without documentation, or they are, like those apprehended at Home Depots while looking for day labor, working for cash, almost always unreported, and are thus evading our income and Social Security taxes.

Those things are all felonies!

What I see is not so different. On both sides of the Atlantic, migrants are regarded as a problem at best, a danger to national security at worst. Trump has no copyright on cruelty. Europeans just put on a friendlier face.

Is there ever a ‘friendly face’ on an arresting officer? Regardless of the crime, no one likes being arrested, but that’s what doing something really radical like enforcing the law requires. Our good friends on the left were saying all along that ‘no one is above the law,’ as they prosecuted and persecuted then former President Donald Trump, trying everything they could to throw him in jail and prohibit him from running for President again. They had no problem with the prosecution and persecution of the January 6 Capitol kerfufflers and screamed blood murder when the re-inaugurated President Trump pardoned them, even though most had already served their sentences. Philadelphia District Attorney, who routinely hands out lenient plea bargains to gang bangers, even said he’d try to prosecute the pardoned kerfufflers on state charges.

But somehow, some way, no one being above the law doesn’t seem to matter to them when it comes to people living in our country illegally. Given that they are committing felonies every day they go to work, I’d say that they are far worse criminals than the kerfufflers ever were.

The decision of then-Chancellor Angela Merkel not to close the borders in 2015 is seen today by many as a cardinal sin that fundamentally changed the German political landscape, leading to the rise of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party, known as the AfD. It came in second place in the recent federal elections.

AfD was founded in 2013, just before the immigration crisis in Germany, but started growing as Germans became more and more disillusioned by the unrestrained, mostly Muslim, immigration. Germany is a democratic republic, and when author Adrian Schulz tells us that the party came in second in recent elections, he is telling us that the German people are disillusioned with the huge number of immigrants in the country.

(Frau Merkel) chose the former. Her phrase, “Wir schaffen das,” or “We can make it,” endeared her to liberals and outraged conservatives, but for a short moment, most Germans celebrated a Willkommenskultur, a culture of welcoming. People brought truckloads of stuffed animals to train stations where the refugee families arrived.

The optimism soon vanished, though. As in other European countries, the debate started to focus on radically limiting the number of asylum-seekers. The rhetoric became hostile.

“As in other European countries . . . .” Herr Schulz has admitted to us that the movement to reject unregulated Muslim immigration is growing throughout the European democracies. The editors of the Inquirer certainly loved an article decrying President Trump’s immigration policies as “callousness” and “cruelty,” but in doing so, the newspaper concomitantly told readers that we were not alone among democracies in rejecting what is, in the end, an attack on our culture, on Western civilization.

This is what the editors of the Inky, and Herr Schulz just don’t quite get. In the democracies that they claim to cherish, sometimes the people may take democratic choices they just don’t like.

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Y’all in a heap o’ trouble, boys!

As I have previously mentioned, I check Bluesky so that you don’t have to, and it was on Bluesky that I found this skeet from Ian Hansen.

Mr Hansen, who posts links to a lot of conservative sites, but has only 391 followers, tries valiantly to educate in ineducable over there, but if it weren’t for his skeet, I would never have heard of this story:

7-Year-Old Girl Repeatedly Raped, Molested by Guatemalan Father, Friend – Police

Two men from Guatemala are facing charges for prolonged sexual abuse of a 7-year-old girl in Florida, authorities say.

Continue reading →

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Sometimes you just have to be an [insert slang term for the rectum here] to do things right

AP Photo/Gregory Bull, via RedState.

Our good friends on the left cheered when the Supreme Court let stand a lower court ruling, in Lozano v City of Hazleton, that only the federal government has any power over immigration, invalidating a Hazleton, Pennsylvania ordinance which prohibited landlords from leasing to immigrants who could not prove their legal status. Continue reading →

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President Trump is winning on immigration: a large number of illegals have apparently self-deported

My good friend Robert Stacy McCain noted this Juneteenth that Steven Camerota and Karen Ziegler of the Center for Immigration Studies analyzed reports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and concluded that “the number of illegal immigrants has fallen by one million since the start of the year.” That number is far greater than the number of illegals that have been deported, and that means, if the estimates are close to correct, what President Trump called self-deportation has been occurring in far greater numbers than the most optimistic of us had hoped.

Let’s extrapolate a bit from this analysis. If the number of illegal immigrants decreased by one million in about five months, that’s an average decline of 200,000 every month — roughly 2.4 million per year. So if the current trend could be continued, by the time the 2028 election rolls around, the number of illegals in the United States will be less than it was when Joe Biden took office in 2021.

At this point, Mr McCain noted what this would do to congressional seat, and therefore electoral vote, apportionment. President Trump tried this, sort of, during his first term, when he wanted immigration status included in the 2020 census, as possibly a way to apportion congressional seats based on the number of American citizens rather than raw population, but that effort failed.

But I look at it differently. I have said it previously, that the United States needs immigrants, but that we need good, vetted, useful, legal immigrants, immigrants of good character, immigrants who have clean criminal records in their home countries, and immigrants who are civic minded, attend church, and will assimilate into our country, to wave American flags, not Mexican ones.

Those who have left voluntarily, without being picked up and kicked out, will have the advantage if they apply for legal immigration, not having a forced deportation on their records. We should be able to investigate their records in their home countries, and their records here in the United States, without prejudice, if they apply to return legally. And those who have poor records, we can exclude.

This is what we should want, people who will come to the United States, contribute to our economy and our society. We can assign reasonable criteria that they have to meet:

  • Couples who have been legally married for more than three years;
  • Couples who have children;
  • No single males of military or fighting age;
  • No gangland or gang-related tattoos;
  • People with marketable skills;
  • People who have a record of good employment;
  • Families who attend Mass regularly; and, of course
  • People with clean criminal records.

There was some Democratic politician, I cannot recall whom, who facetiously tried to justify illegal immigration by saying that the Latin American countries were sending us their best people. Actually, I saw it as people who weren’t good enough to make it in their own countries! But with the kinds of criteria I listed, and other criteria could be suggested, we could do our best to assure that the immigrants admitted actually are the best for whom we could hope.

The vast majority of Americans, including the majority of people who voted for President Trump, would gladly accept those kind of immigrants.

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Will the “No Kings” protests be peaceful?

Perhaps we have noted The Philadelphia Inquirer’s far left and #TrumpDerangement Syndrome afflicted columnist Will Bunch too much recently, but, while doing everything he can to defend the rioters and illegal immigrants in Los Angeles, he’s worried that such might come to the City of Brotherly Love.

Not that he won’t defend the rioters if violence does come to Philadelphia! But, guess what? It already has! Continue reading →

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Requiescat in Pace, Pope Francis

My Twitter — I refuse to call it 𝕏 — feed was full of chortling posts claiming that the Vatican denied Vice President J D Vance a meeting with Pope Francis, sending the Vatican’s second-ranking official instead, in what the left loudly proclaimed was a deliberate snub to Mr Vance.

That’s not quite what it was.

The story behind JD Vance’s unlikely visit with Pope Francis

Vance and Francis had publicly disagreed in recent months on immigration policies and other aspects of church teaching.

Continue reading →

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CNN reporter Barbie Latza Nadeau accidentally tells the truth, though I’m sure she is appalled by it

I spotted this following story thanks to a tweet from William Teach of The Pirate’s Cove. Mr Teach noted that CNN seemed far more concerned that an alleged gang rape of a 13-year-old girl in Sicily would benefit conservative politicians — called the “far-right” by CNN — than they were about the fact that a young teenager was raped!

An alleged gang rape shocks Italy, and provides fodder for an ascendant far right

By Barbie Latza Nadeau, CNN | Sunday, February 11, 2024 | Updated: 5:27 AM EST

Rome CNN — Italy has been shaken by the alleged gang rape of a 13-year-old girl in front of her boyfriend in a public park in the Sicilian city of Catania, the latest in a string of shocking sexual attacks in the country.

The case is reminiscent of two alleged gang rapes last summer. A group of seven men and teenage boys between the ages of 15 and 18 are currently on trial for the alleged rape of a 19-year-old girl in Palermo in August.

Weeks later nine young men were arrested and charged with allegedly raping two cousins aged 10 and 12 near Naples and broadcasting the attack live on social media. They, too, are facing trial.

Last month’s alleged gang rape in Catania has become not only a symbol of violence against women in the country, but a cause célèbre for Italy’s far-right government. The seven suspected perpetrators were all Egyptian migrants, three of them under the age of 18, Catania police confirmed to CNN.

There’s more at the original.

As we previously reported, a ‘migrant’ from Venezuela has been arrested for trying to shoot an New York City Police Officer, and wounding a tourist in Times Square. Neither the United States as a whole, or New York more specifically, has a “far-right” government to which to tie that crime, and somehow, some way, CNN didn’t cover the story of the arrest of Jesus Alejandro Rivas-Figueroa at all, or at least a site search for Rivas-Figueroa conducted at 12:55 PM EST this morning returned no stories on the subject.

Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, came to power in September 2022 on an anti-immigration platform, but her efforts to curb irregular migration into the country have so far been unsuccessful.

How interesting that CNN reporter Barbie Latza Nadeau characterized Prime Minister Meloni and her government as “far-right,” and then linked an article which said, among other things, “She was nowhere near as far-right as some had feared, and the multilingual career politician was at ease with global world leaders.” 🙂 Perhaps if she had been more stringently “far-right” Italy would have been more successful in intercepting and turning around the ‘migrants’ boats.

The CNN writer then had a several paragraph section beginning with, “Italy has long struggled with the problem of gender-based violence,” even as she noted that the parliament has passed measures to more greatly criminalize such.

The legislation was inspired by the case of Giulia Cecchettin, a 22-year-old woman murdered by an ex-boyfriend. She was one of 118 femicides in Italy last year. In 2022, women were the victims of 91% of homicides committed by family members, partners or former partners, according to the European Data Journalism Network.

“Violence against women is a phenomenon that’s more or less present in all countries, caused by structural causes like the disparity between men and women, stereotypes and prejudices,” Elena Biaggioni, vice president of D.i.Re, a national association that coordinates anti-violence centers and women’s shelters, said last June.

Speaking at a protest after a pregnant woman was allegedly stabbed to death by her partner, she added: “But of course in countries where there’s a macho culture and sexism is stronger, like Italy, this violence is justified in a different way.”

Yet in the latest case, officials have centered their attention on the background of the alleged perpetrators.

So, are you convinced yet that this is not really a problem of the illegal immigrants, but Italy, and wicked Italian men in general? It’s not the fault of the illegal immigrants, but the problem is that “officials” who have focused on the “background of the alleged perpetrators.” That’s pretty clearly what Miss Nadeau wants you to believe. But next comes the money line, though I doubt that the CNN writer realized it:

The judge investigating the most recent case, Carlo Umberto Cannella, said the suspects were likely to reoffend because they were not “accustomed to civilization.”

Absolutely right! Islamic ‘civilization,’ if you can call it civilization at all, simply is nothing like Western civilization, and Judge Cannella told the truth. Islamic ‘civilization’ has produced, in the 21st century, an Iran which jails and occasionally beats to death women who don’t properly wear a headscarf, an Afghanistan where girls cannot be educated past the sixth grade, women are forced to wear head-to-toe burkas, and must be accompanied by a responsible male if they leave the home. Islamic ‘civilization’ has produced Hamas, which used murder and deliberate rape to terrorize Israeli civilians, and Da’ish, which throws homosexuals off of tall buildings.

They are not Westerners, and if we try to think of them as Westerners or expect them to behave as Westerners, we are deceiving ourselves and endangering actually civilized people.

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Would you agree to house illegal immigrants in your home? Not just no, but Hell no!

I will admit it: when I first saw this tweet, which contained no documentary link, I said to myself, “Self, this just has to be faked, so I Google searched for it. Guess what?

Governor Healey asks residents to house migrant families amid growing shelter crisis

by Kelly Sullivan | August 9, 2023 | 6:18 AM EDT

The state’s shelters are reaching capacity and now the governor is asking residents to help by opening their doors. That was part of Governor Maura Healey’s announcement–as she also is looking for help from the federal government. Continue reading →