Pre-Election Miracle? Illegal Border Crossings Miraculously Drop to Four-Year Low
US Customs and Border Patrol’s migrant encounter numbers along the southwestern border with Mexico have hit a four-year low, new figures suggest.
“In July, the Border Patrol recorded 56,408 encounters between ports of entry along the southwest border,” the agency said in a press release, referring to the border between Mexico and the US states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas.
CBP said its “operational statistics” for last month “show a significant decline in migrant encounters during the first full month after a Presidential Proclamation issued June 4, 2024 by President Biden to temporarily suspend the entry of certain noncitizens across the southern border.
US Border Patrol encounters in July were 32% lower than in June 2024 and were the lowest monthly total along the southwest border since September 2020.”
Last month’s figures are also “lower than in July 2019, and lower than the monthly average for all of 2019, the last comparable year prior to the pandemic,” the agency added.
Biden’s June proclamation moved to restrict asylum eligibility for illegal aliens entering the United States via the southern border, with some 92,000 individuals ejected from the US and sent to their home countries on 300+ repatriation flights – with removals ballooning to their highest level since 2010.
The proclamation came after years of increasingly harsh criticism of Biden’s border policy by Republicans, and fears among Democrats that the issue may cost them the White House in November.
A Fox News poll this week found that some 87% of would-be voters consider the situation at the southern border a serious concern, with 44% dubbing it an “emergency” and 43% a “major problem,” and the issue found to be a concern among all demographics, including among black Americans, Hispanics, women, and registered Democrats. Some 71% of respondents blamed the Biden administration for failure to enforce the border, with 57% also saying that former President Donald Trump and Senate Republicans deserve some of the blame for blocking legislation on comprehensive immigration reform.
The border crisis is tied with abortion at 14% as the second most important issue in this year’s election behind the economy (38%).
The Biden administration facilitated the crisis at the southern border almost immediately after entering office in 2021 by moving to repeal a series of hardline Trump-era immigration directives and vowing to scrap Trump’s signature border wall in favor of a digital “smart wall” which never materialized. An estimate earlier this year suggested that over 7.3 million illegal aliens had entered the United States since Biden took office in 2021.
After Biden announced last month that he would not be seeking a second term, Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’s campaign sought to distance the candidate from her status as the administration’s “border czar” – a title bestowed on her by US media in March of 2021. Harris’ handlers have gone to stupefying lengths to dismiss the “border czar” moniker, to the point where some media have released “fact check”-style articles assuring that Harris was never really a “border czar,” despite ample reporting from 3.5 years ago using the epithet to refer to her.
Donald Trump and his allies have dubbed the situation at the southern border a “disaster” and an “invasion” that could “destroy our country.” Some have also attacked those mainstream Republican lawmakers who voted for nearly $100 billion for wars earlier this year abroad while consciously ignoring the border crisis.
Tim Walz Caught in New Acts of Stolen Valor
Kamala Harris’ Proposed Price Controls May Lead to ‘Communism, Mass Starvation, End of America’
At a rally in North Carolina on Friday, Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for president, unveiled her communist-style economic plan of ‘price controls.’
Her argument has been evil capitalism and corporations for rampant inflation, despite the reality that reckless government spending under her and President Biden is the primary driver of sky-high prices, particularly in the grocery store.
What’s hilarious is that even Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell criticized VP Harris’ economic plan to implement price controls to stop “price gouging” on groceries.
“It’s hard to exaggerate how bad this policy is,” Rampell wrote. She titled the op-ed, “When your opponent calls you ‘communist,’ maybe don’t propose price controls?”
On Saturday morning, Elon Musk reposted one food industry insider’s step-by-step summary of what would happen if Harris’ economic price control plan was implemented. Musk wrote, “Accurate conclusion (read the whole post).”
“I worked in M&A in the food industry,” Robert Sterling wrote on X. He provided readers with a detailed step-by-step summary of what would happen:
- The government announces that grocery retailers aren’t allowed to raise prices.
- Grocery stores, which operate on 1-2% net margins, can’t survive if their suppliers raise prices. So the government announces that food producers (Kraft Heinz, ConAgra, Tyson, Hormel, et. al.) also aren’t allowed to raise prices.
- Not all grocery stores are created equal. Stores in lower-income areas make less money than those in higher-income areas, as the former disproportionately sell lower-margin prepackaged foods (“center of the store”) instead of higher-margin fresh products like meat (“perimeter of the store”). Because stores in lower-income areas aren’t able to cover overhead (remember, even if their wholesale costs are fixed, their labor, utilities, insurance, and other operating expenses aren’t fixed… yet), grocery chains start to shut them down. Food deserts in rural areas and in low-income urban areas alike become worse.
- Meanwhile, margins for food producers are also quickly eroding. Their primary costs (ingredients, energy, and labor) aren’t fixed, and their shrinking gross profits leave less cash flow available to cover overhead, maintain facilities, and reinvest in additional production capacity.
- Grocery chains, which have finite shelf space, start to repurpose their stores (those they didn’t have to shut down, I should say) to sell more non-price-controlled items—everything from nutrition supplements to kitchenware to apparel—and less price-controlled food products. Your local Kroger or Safeway starts to look and feel more like a Walmart.
- Food producers stop making products with lower margins. Grocery chain start competing with each other to secure inventory. Since they can’t compete by offering stronger prices (remember, producers aren’t allowed to raise prices here, and, even if they could, grocery chains no longer have the gross profit to bear price increases), they compete on things like payment terms.
- Small grocery chains start to shut down entirely, or get sold to larger chains like Kroger. In addition to not being able to cover fixed costs, a major reason for this is because they can no longer reliably secure delivery of products, due to producers prioritizing sales to larger customers, which are able to leverage their stronger balance sheets to offer superior payment terms.
- Smaller food producers—which typically sell via distributors, rather than directly to grocery chains—start to go out of business. Because these producers have an additional step their value chains, and because they have lower volumes over which to spread their fixed costs, their cost structure is inherently disadvantaged compared to major food producers. When grocery stores aren’t able to raise prices, cutting product costs becomes all the more important, and deprioritizing purchases from smaller producers is an easy way to do so.
- As supply chains break down, lines start to form outside grocery stores every morning. Cities assign police officers to patrol store parking lots, and food producers draft contingency plans to assign armed escorts to delivery trucks.
- The federal government announces a program to issue block grants for states to purchase and operate shuttered grocery stores. The USDA also seizes closed-down production facilities.
- The government announces that prices for all key food costs—corn, wheat, cattle, energy, etc.—are also now fixed, to stop “profiteers” from gouging the now-government-operated food industry.
- Shockingly, the government struggles to operate one of the most complex industries on the planet. The entire food supply chain starts imploding.
- Communism, mass starvation, and the end of America quickly ensue.
Accurate conclusion (read the whole post) https://t.co/E0JcF2lxoG
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 17, 2024
In a separate post, Sterling noted, “The impact on small rural communities would be terrible. I hate driving through small towns in the Midwest and seeing a DG next to a closed-down grocery store that operated from 1900 to 2018.”
Really appreciate it, brother. And, to your point, the impact on small rural communities would be terrible. I hate driving through small towns in the Midwest and seeing a DG next to a closed-down grocery store that operated from 1900 to 2018.
— Robert Sterling (@RobertMSterling) August 17, 2024
“Inflation is experienced at the grocery store, but always manufactured by the government. It’s the same story every time. The politicians who create it by printing money, villainize and blame companies that have nothing to do with it — to distract from their reckless spending,” Cameron Winklevoss wrote on X.
Inflation is experienced at the grocery store, but always manufactured by the government. It’s the same story every time. The politicians who create it by printing money, villainize and blame companies that have nothing to do with it — to distract from their reckless spending. https://t.co/EJkng1004Q
— Cameron Winklevoss (@cameron) August 16, 2024
We’re glad Americans just woke up in a big way – in recent days – to understand finally far-left radical VP Harris is nothing more than a communist-pusher.
Which way, Western man?
Tim Walz Caught in New Acts of Stolen Valor
US Has Lowest Life Expectancy among Wealthy English-speaking Countries
The US has the lowest national life expectancy among its wealthy English-speaking peers, according to a new study.
Researchers from Penn State University looked at mortality rates from 1990 to 2019 in the US, Canada, Ireland, the UK, Australia and New Zealand, and discovered that the US ranked last in terms of average life expectancy.
In the US, average life expectancy for men is 76.5, while for women it’s 81.5. In Australia, by contrast, men live five years longer than men in the US and women four years longer than women in the US.
There were clear regional differences across the US, with men and women in California and Hawaii living longer than the national average, but still not as long as Australians, whereas in the Southeast of the US, life expectancy was far below the US average. In the Southeast, men live to 69.3 years of age on average and women 72.6.
The researchers attribute the lower rates of life expectancy in the US to more young Americans dying from drug overdoses, murder, and car accidents than in other countries, and middle-aged Americans having higher rates of death from cardiovascular disease.
A recent study showed that opioid deaths alone in the US reduced life expectancy in 2022 by 0.67 years, for a total of 3.1 million lost years of life and 38 life years lost per individual death.
Harris Campaign Mandating COVID Vaxx
The Harris-Walz campaign is mandating up-to-date COVID-19 vaccinations for employees.
Listings for on-site and remote jobs with the campaign posted to kamalaharris.com feature a requirement for all employees to be “up to date” on vaccines.
“Harris for President requires all employees to be ‘up to date’ on COVID-19 vaccination status as prescribed by the CDC as a condition of employment, unless otherwise prohibited by applicable law,” the requirement states.
“If you seek a reasonable accommodation in relation to the campaign’s COVID-19 policy, you should speak to the HR Department prior to reporting to an office location.”
According to the Centres for Disease Control, “up to date” means having received at least one age-appropriate updated COVID-19 vaccine for under 65s. Over 65s must receive at least two doses.
The vaccine mandate for federal employees and contractors ended in May 2023, when the end of the COVID public-health emergency was declared.
In recent weeks, Kamala Harris’s running-mate, Tim Walz, has faced scrutiny for his policies as governor of Minnesota during the pandemic, which included setting up a so-called “snitch line” for citizens to alert the authorities about people flouting the rules.
Tim Walz poisoned low incomes families who desperately needed money and gave their children, who had zero risk of Covid, an experimental vaccine. pic.twitter.com/Mb3Gavsvz9
— Cernovich (@Cernovich) August 6, 2024
Walz also provided financial incentives of $200 for parents to have their children vaccinated.
Planned Parenthood To Offer Free Vasectomies & Abortions During DNC
Planned Parenthood will be offering free vasectomies and abortions during this years Democratic National Convention (DNC) According to The New York Times, Planned parenthood will set up a mobile health clinic “blocks away” from the […]
The post Planned Parenthood To Offer Free Vasectomies & Abortions During DNC appeared first on The People’s Voice.
Former Trump Advisor Claims Home Was Raided by FBI after He Criticized Biden
A former Trump advisor had his home raided by the FBI last week, in apparent retaliation for criticism of Biden’s Ukraine policy.
Russian-born Dimitri Simes claims his home in Virginia was raided by the FBI after he spoke out against “official policies” and “the deep state.” Mr Simes was not in the US at the time.
He told Sputnik News that the raid “clearly is an attempt to intimidate, not only somebody from Russia, but just anyone who goes against official policies and particularly against the deep state
“My suspicion is that instead of trying to get me to come to the United States and to interrogate me—or even to arrest me—their real purpose is to make sure that I would not come back,” said Simes.
Simes also had a bank account frozen that he uses to pay the mortgage on the property.
He claims he was not provided with any prior notification of the raid.
Simes linked the raid on his property in Huntly, to ongoing lawfare against Trump and key Trump supporters like Rudy Giuliani.
“A number of prominent Americans were subjected to searches or even put in jail, or made bankrupt,” he said.
“So, this is the way American law enforcement is working today? If somebody goes against the political mainstream, in particular against the Biden administration, the punishment may be very swift.”
Simes moved to the US from the USSR in the 1970s. He worked as an informal policy advisor for President Nixon before moving to the Center for the National Interest, where he worked for three decades.
He advised Trump’s 2016 campaign and was a person of interest in the Russia-collusion investigation headed by special counsel Robert Mueller. His name was mentioned 130 times in Mueller’s final report, but he and the Center for the National Interest were cleared of any wrongdoing.