Since late 2020, Border Patrol along the United States–Mexico border has encountered over 6.9 million illegal crossers. A recent Pew Research survey reveals that 57 percent of respondents consider "dealing with immigration" a top policy priority this election year—just below "defending against terrorism" at 63 percent.  Amid this backdrop, politicians and pundits have been quick to conflate these issues, holding numerous congressional hearings on the purported threat of terrorists entering the U.S. to commit acts of terror. This has given rise to a flood of rhetoric about said terrorists ..read more

Earlier this week I took part in a Federalist Society Executive Branch Review conference panel on "Law and Order at the Border." The other two panelists were former Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, and former Trump Administration Department of Homeland Security deputy general counsel official Sohan Dasgupta. In my presentation, I explained why illegal migration and drug smuggling are not "invasion" (contrary to claims by the state of Texas in two cases currently being litigated in federal court)  and how best way to deal with border issues is by making legal migration easier. On bo ..read more

Johnson's alliance: House Speaker Mike Johnson (R–La.) is attempting to spend lots of your freshly forked over taxpayer dollars on several aid bills which will go toward Israel, Ukraine, and other allies. Just one problem: He cannot convince his Republican colleagues to get on board—a dynamic we've seen repeated over and over again, as Republicans are split on how much foreign aid the U.S. ought to be doling out (with a right-wing flank of the party continuing to make foreign aid contingent on securing the southern border). Now Johnson is attempting to rely on Democrats to get his bills ..read more

This week's featured article is "Anti-Chinese Xenophobia Fueled America's First Drug War" by Jacob Sullum. This audio was generated using AI trained on the voice of Katherine Mangu-Ward. Music credits: "Deep in Thought" by CTRL and "Sunsettling" by Man with Roses The post <I>The Best of Reason</I>: Anti-Chinese Xenophobia Fueled America's First Drug War appeared first on Reason.com ..read more

Around 2 a.m. on Monday, December 6, 1875, a "posse of police" led by Captain William Douglass descended on 609 Dupont Street in San Francisco. The cops arrested Fannie Whitmore, Cora Martinez, James Dennison, and Charles Anderson, along with "two Chinamen who kept the place." That place, The San Francisco Examiner explained, was an "opium den," and this was the first raid conducted under an ordinance that the city's Board of Supervisors had enacted on November 15. The new law decreed that "no person shall, in the city and county of San Francisco, keep or maintain, or become an inma ..read more

(Lex Villena; Photo: Matthew Hatcher / SOPA Images/Si/Newscom) In a recent article at the UnPopulist website, my Cato Institute colleague Walter Olson (who is an election law expert) explains why right-wing claims that noncitizens are voting illegally in large numbers are a myth: If you believe Elon Musk, "Democrats" are permitting large numbers of immigrants into the country on purpose in order to win elections. By "ushering in vast numbers of illegals," he wrote on X March 5, "they are importing voters." Even if Democrats do deport many unlawfully present persons, they can't be wholehearte ..read more

Following up on those shitholes: Donald Trump, at a fundraiser in Florida's Palm Beach this past Saturday night, decided to clarify some of his thoughts on immigration. He referred to his comments back in 2018, when he questioned why the U.S. should be letting in immigrants from what he called "shithole countries" like Haiti and Nigeria, saying that Haitians "all have AIDS" and that Nigerians should "go back to their huts" and that America should let in more Norwegians. "And when I said, you know, Why can't we allow people to come in from nice countries, I'm trying to be nice," Trump said at ..read more

When Cixin Liu's science fiction novel, The Three-Body Problem, debuted in English translation for American readers in 2014, it was clear that it was a comment on the perils of Chinese authoritarianism. The books have now been adapted into a series for Netflix; seen today, the story looks as much like a comment on social media. There's a reason that the first shades so quickly into the second.  The novel, initially published in 2008, begins with a harrowing sequence from China's Cultural Revolution in which a scientist is beaten and ultimately killed as part of a "struggle session," a pu ..read more

Immigration ranks as the second-most important issue among registered U.S. voters and the top issue for Republican voters, according to a Marist Poll/PBS NewsHour/NPR poll released last month. Perhaps that's because of the 3.2 million border encounters documented by Border Patrol in 2023—a new record high that's so far being outpaced this year. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who to erect razor wire fencing at the border despite a Supreme Court ruling prohibiting Texas from stopping federal agents from cutting through the barriers, has likely also heightened the salience of the issue for Republican v ..read more

Recovery efforts remain underway in the aftermath of the collapse of Baltimore's Francis Scott Key Bridge, which was struck by a container ship early on Tuesday. Vehicles and multiple construction workers fell into the river below. Two men were rescued from the water, while six are still missing and presumed dead. Little is known about why the ship struck the bridge. The National Transportation Safety Board, which is investigating the incident, is still assessing reports that the vessel lost power before the collision. Numerous far-fetched theories about the incident are now circulating to fi ..read more