World
McConnell Backs Trump on Chain-Migration, Ditches Sen. Flake
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell suggested Tuesday he will only bring an immigration bill to t..

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell suggested Tuesday he will only bring an immigration bill to the Senate floor if it matches President Donald Trump’s immigration policies.
The proposed re-alignment with Trump and his populist supporters was included in a Wednesday statement by McConnell, and undercut retiring GOP Sen. Jeff Flake’s claim on early Wednesday that McConnell had agreed to an amnesty vote in January.
Flake’s earlier Tweet claimed:
Bipartisan #DACA bill will be on the Senate floor in January.
— Jeff Flake (@JeffFlake) December 20, 2017
McConnell’s statement also shuts down Democrats’ promise to their ethnic lobbies that they will push the huge DREAM Act amnesty in January.
Their DREAM Act amnesty would provide a no-strings amnesty to 3.25 million illegals, and put them on a fast track to welfare, grants, and voting rights. The DREAM Act would also deliver residency to millions of the illegals’ relatives, including the illegal-immigrant parents who brought them into the United States. The DREAM Act amnesty would cost taxpayers at least $26 billion in just the first 10 years, according to a December 15 report by the Congressional Budget Office.
The “Secure Act” touted by McConnell is being led by Sen. Chuck Grassley, in cooperation with Texas Sen. John Cornyn and the two authors of the RAISE Act, Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotten and Georgia Sen. David Perdue. Grassley’s SECURE Act incorporates the RAISE Act which would end chain-migration and the visa lottery.
If chain-migration is ended, immigration will fall by roughly 50 percent. That change would help push up wages for Americans and help get nine million sidelined Americans into jobs. The change would also slow the nation’s politically chaotic slide into diversity and cultural conflict, and force Democrats to shift their electoral emphasis from immigrants’ concerns back towards Americans’ priorities. Trump has repeatedly backed the RAISE Act.
However, Sen. John Cornyn has suggested that chain-migration would be phased out in stages, raising suspicions among pro-American immigration reformers.
Grassley’s SECURE Act also includes a small-scale amnesty, dubbed the BRIDGE Act, which would provide a one-time set of three-year work-permits to the roughly 690,000 ‘DACA” illegals, not to all of the 3.25 million ‘dreamer’ illegals.
Moreover, experts assume that Grassley’s inclusion of the BRIDGE Act in his SECURE Act is just a place-holder for a larger amnesty.
One likely alternative is the bigger SUCCEED amnesty being pushed by two GOP Senators, Sen. Thom Tillis and Sen. James Lankford.
The Tillis and Lankford SUCCEED Act amnesty would help employers and retailers by providing work-permits and welfare benefits to 2 million illegals, while also helping the GOP with a 1o-year delay on chain migration and a 15-year delay on voting. The Tillis/Lankford Act, however, does not reduce the economic impact on ordinary Americans who would have to compete for jobs against the low-wage amnesty beneficiaries and also pay for their welfare.
Nine million American men have been pushed out of the workforce by the federal government's policy of lowering wages, says Obama economist. But he can't mention the cause — the federal policy of goosing economic growth via cheap-labor immigration. https://t.co/OUs2C2idNT
— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) December 19, 2017
President Donald Trump laid down his popular immigration promises during the 2016 election and issued another set of principles in October. Those promises include no amnesty for years, while the October principles demanded that any congressional deal stop the hugely expensive practice of chain-migration and also end visa lottery. Trump’s officials and deputies — including Kelly — are also emphasizing those goals in their public and private statements.
But Trump has also said he wants to get an amnesty for at least some of the younger illegals, despite his campaign-trail opposition to a wage-lowering amnesty.
Democrats strongly oppose Trump’s immigration priorities, suggesting that the issue may remain deadlocked, and be pushed front-and-center in the 2018 elections.
Several GOP Senators have also aligned themselves with the Democrats’ amnesty plans.
Four business-first GOP Senators openly negotiate an amnesty with Democrats, without any visible effort to include Trump's popular pro-American priorities. https://t.co/CxFvuqPfvw
— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) December 15, 2017
Many polls show that the Democrats’ calls for amnesty are unpopular because they contradict Americans’ sense of fairness to other Americans. That pro-American pressure is hidden by business and largely ignored by the media — despite the 2016 election results — but could play a large role in the pending 2018 election fights.
Business groups and Democrats embrace the misleading, industry-funded “nation of immigrants” polls which pressure Americans to say they welcome migrants.
The alternative “fairness” polls show that voters put a much higher priority on helping their families, neighbors, and fellow nationals get decent jobs in a high-tech, high-immigration, low-wage economy.
The post McConnell Backs Trump on Chain-Migration, Ditches Sen. Flake appeared first on News Wire Now.
World
Nuclear annihilation just one miscalculation away, UN chief warns

The world is one misstep from devastating nuclear war and in peril not seen since the Cold War, the UN Secretary General has warned.
“We have been extraordinarily lucky so far,” Antonio Guterres said.
Amid rising global tensions, “humanity is just one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation”, he added.
His remarks came at the opening of a conference for countries signed up to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
The 1968 deal was introduced after the Cuban missile crisis, an event often portrayed as the closest the world ever came to nuclear war. The treaty was designed to stop the spread of nuclear weapons to more countries, and to pursue the ultimate goal of complete nuclear disarmament.
Almost every nation on Earth is signed up to the NPT, including the five biggest nuclear powers. But among the handful of states never to sign are four known or suspected to have nuclear weapons: India, Israel, North Korea and Pakistan.
Secretary General Guterres said the “luck” the world had enjoyed so far in avoiding a nuclear catastrophe may not last – and urged the world to renew a push towards eliminating all such weapons.
“Luck is not a strategy. Nor is it a shield from geopolitical tensions boiling over into nuclear conflict,” he said.
And he warned that those international tensions were “reaching new highs” – pointing specifically to the invasion of Ukraine, tensions on the Korean peninsula and in the Middle East as examples.
Russia was widely accused of escalating tensions when days after his invasion of Ukraine in February, President Vladimir Putin put Russia’s substantial nuclear forces on high alert.
He also threatened anyone standing in Russia’s way with consequences “you have never seen in your history”. Russia’s nuclear strategy includes the use of nuclear weapons if the state’s existence is under threat.
On Monday, Mr Putin wrote to the same non-proliferation conference Mr Guterres opened, declaring that “there can be no winners in a nuclear war and it should never be unleashed”.
But Russia still found itself criticised at the NPT conference.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken condemned what he called Russia’s sabre-rattling – and pointed out that Ukraine had handed over its Soviet-era nuclear weapons in 1994, after receiving assurances of its future security from Russia and others.
“What message does this send to any country around the world that may think that it needs to have nuclear weapons – to protect, to defend, to deter aggression against its sovereignty and independence?” he asked. “The worst possible message”.
Today, some 13,000 nuclear weapons are thought to remain in service in the arsenals of the nine nuclear-armed states – far lower than the estimated 60,000 stockpiled during the peak of the mid-1980s.
Read from: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-62381425
World
Australia election: Why is Australia’s parliament so white?

World
US military leader warns Chinese security deal with Solomon Islands sounds ‘too good to be true’

A senior US military general has warned during a visit to Australia that China’s offer to deepen security ties with Solomon Islands will come with strings attached, suggesting the Pacific island country may come to regret the planned deal.
“My parents told me if a deal sounds too good to be true, it probably is,” the commandant of the United States Marine Corps, general David Berger, said on Wednesday.
Berger was cautious when asked about longstanding US concerns relating to a Chinese company’s lease over the port of Darwin, stressing it was a sovereign decision for Australia as part of its yet-to-be-completed national security review.
Ahead of a trip to Darwin, the site of increasing rotations of US Marines, Berger said: “If it’s not of concern to Australia, then it’s not of concern to me.”
Berger’s visit comes amid a flurry of diplomatic activity by the US and Australia attempting to head off a proposed security agreement between China and Solomon Islands, which could allow regular visits by the People’s Liberation Army Navy.
A leaked draft from last month raised the possibility China could “make ship visits to, carry out logistical replenishment in, and have stopover and transition in Solomon Islands”, while Chinese forces could also be used “to protect the safety of Chinese personnel and major projects in Solomon Islands”.
The prime minister of Solomon Islands, Manasseh Sogavare, has sought to allay concerns, saying his country has no intention of allowing a Chinese naval base. But Sogavare has also said it is “very insulting to be branded as unfit to manage our sovereign affairs”.
Speaking in Canberra on Wednesday, Berger said the US needed to show humility in its outreach to Pacific nations, but also needed to be open about the potential long-term consequences.
Berger reflected on the fight for control of Guadalcanal in Solomon Islands during the second world war, when the US and allies sought to prevent Japanese forces from gaining a foothold in the strategically important location.
“A lot of things change in warfare. Not geography. Where … Solomon Islands are matters. It did then and it does now,” Berger said at the Australian Strategic Policy
Institute.
He said the proposed agreement was “just another example” of China seeking to broaden and expand its influence. He raised concerns about “the way that [it] happens and the consequences for the nations” involved.
Sogavare has argued Solomon Islands pursues a “friends to all and enemies to none” foreign policy, but Berger implied countries making agreements with Beijing might regret it down the track.
“We should illuminate, we should draw out into the open what this means long term,” Berger said.
“This is, in other words, an extension of ‘hey we’re here with a cheque, we’re here with money, we’d like to improve your port or your airfield or your bus station’. And that just sounds so great, until a year later or six months later.”
The US plans to reopen its embassy in Solomon Islands, a move the nominee for US ambassador to Australia, Caroline Kennedy, has said “can’t come soon enough”.
Berger acknowledged there were limits to US insights in Pacific island countries, so the US needed to rely on allies such as Australia.
“We’re not going to have always the best view, the clearest picture,” he said.
“We have to understand the neighbourhood and we’re never going to understand it as well as Australia.”
Earlier, the Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, denied that the US had conveyed any concerns that Australia had dropped the ball in the region.
Morrison said the Australian government was continuing to raise concerns with Solomon Islands without acting in a “heavy-handed” way.
Australia’s minister for the Pacific, Zed Seselja, met with Sogavare in Honiara on Wednesday and “asked Solomon Islands respectfully to consider not signing the agreement” with China.
Seselja suggested Solomon Islands “consult the Pacific family in the spirit of regional openness and transparency”. Australia would work with Solomon Islands “swiftly, transparently and with full respect for its sovereignty”.
“We welcome recent statements from prime minister Sogavare that Australia remains Solomon Islands’ security partner of choice, and his commitment that Solomon Islands will never be used for military bases or other military institutions of foreign powers,” Seselja said.
Sogavare has previously said Solomon Islands welcomed “any country that is willing to support us in our security space”.
But Matthew Wale, the leader of the opposition, has argued the deal “would make the Solomons a geopolitical playing field” and “further threaten the nation’s fragile unity”.
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