Boy, they're dragging out this DACA thing, aren't they? Where are we up to this week?

As I've been reporting, there are two issues in play here: Funding the government, and resolving the DACA business—those 800,000 illegal aliens who were given temporary work permits, probably illegally, by Barack Obama … and who are not, by the way, to be confused with "Dreamers." "Dreamers" are illegals who would have been beneficiaries of the DREAM Act, except that Congress has never been able to pass it. There would have been two million of them.

The two issues, DACA and funding the government, have two different deadlines for congressional action. For funding the government, Congress has to pass a law before midnight January 19th, two weeks from this last Friday. For DACA the deadline is March 5th, eight and a half weeks from Friday, when President Trump's extension of Obama's (probably unconstitutional) order expires. Read more >>

Thomas Homan (right) Acting Director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is promising stepped up worksite enforcement actions, something we never really saw in 2017. But some of his underlings want to limit actions to “critical infrastructure,” such as airports, defense contractors and food distribution, instead of work site raids. This is misguided. It’s time for immigration enforcement to go big or go home, and for Homan to make sure his underlings get the job done. Read more >>

I owe a significant personal debt to Senator Orrin Hatch (R.-Utah), who has just announced he will not seek an eighth term in 2018: years ago, he helped me, then a U.K. citizen and thus discriminated against by the post-1965 immigration regime, return to the U.S. after my post-Stanford sojourn in Canada. For that reason, I’ve never said much about my 1979-1980 time on his staff, in case he be blamed for my views, or criticized his subsequent career, brutally summarized from the right by Michelle Malkin here—although I must admit that VDARE.com coverage of his awful immigration record (NumbersUSA Career Grade: C, in this Congress: D) has been fairly scathing.

Hatch hired me in 1979 for a reason that he might now regard as even more embarrassing:  I was recommended as his successor as “Economic Counsel” by Paul Craig Roberts, then renowned as a proponent of the radical supply-side economics revolution and headed to the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page, now perhaps even more Politically Incorrect than I am.

To put this in incredible perspective: I was actually reluctant to leave Canada, which I loved and where I had become a national columnist. I was finally talked into it by William A. Rusher, then the publisher of National Review and (in my view) at least the nursemaid of the American Conservative Movement. He told me privately that Hatch, although first elected only in 1976, had already caught the eye of Ronald Reagan backers who viewed him as a potential backup if Reagan, then at 69 viewed as problematically old, blew up on the campaign trail. (An amazing fear considering the geriatric hegemony that now prevails in American politics—including, in a small way, me).

I could have been Stephen Miller! Read more >>

As tens of thousands marched in the streets of Tehran on Wednesday in support of the regime, the head of the Revolutionary Guard Corps assured Iranians the "sedition" had been defeated.

Maj. Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari is whistling past the graveyard.

The protests that broke out a week ago and spread Read more >>