Migrant Invasion in Spain Sparked by Court Ruling
A total of 60,000 tough young men from Morocco suddenly arrived in a small town of Spain in northern Africa, many carrying their cell phones in plastic bags to protect them from the water they crossed by inner tubes and swimming. This migration is greater than the population of 95% of American cities and towns.
A recent pro-immigration ruling by the Tribunal Supremo, the Supreme Court of Spain, sparked this invasion, creating a lesson for our crisis of illegal aliens in the United States. A week after our own Supreme Court’s disastrous decision in favor of illegals getting birthright citizenship, Spain’s Supreme Court ruled that migrants captured at sea cannot be immediately returned to their native country, known as a “pushback.”
Spanish Territorial Policy Minister Ángel Víctor Torres specifically referred to the ruling as a factor contributing to unlawful invasion. He also said that legal experts think the decision will allow eventual deportation of these illegal aliens, but only after time-consuming due process is provided to each of the invading migrants.
The language of Morocco is Arabic. But Spanish is the language of the two Spanish territories in northern Africa, named Ceuta and Melilla, such that many of the migrants cannot communicate with local officials.
Ceuta is located on the African side of the Strait of Gibraltar, where the Atlantic Ocean meets the Mediterranean Sea, and residents receive their food as transported by trucks carried by the 30-60 minute hourly ferry ride from Spain. Melilla is located 250 miles eastward on the Mediterranean coast.
These migrants have overwhelmed the local facilities, and are sleeping on beaches with limited access to food or drinking water. Due to the court ruling, they must be admitted for processing in compliance with Spanish immigration rules, which takes time.
If released during this process, as many illegal aliens in America have been, they may not show up for court hearings or appointments with immigration authorities. They can roam about for years, and have rights to migrate further into any European Union country once they are lawfully in Spain.
Social media are being blamed for spreading the word that if migrants swam or boated to Ceuta or Melilla, they would then have a right to stay. This has been criticized as a misinterpretation of the court ruling, but the court did grant special due process rights to those who came by sea rather than by land.
This fiasco gives new meaning to the famous Longfellow poem which exclaimed about the signal to be sent by one or two lanterns in the belfry of Boston’s Old North Church: “One, if by land, and two, if by sea; And I on the opposite shore will be, Ready to ride and spread the alarm.” Spread the alarm, indeed.
The most common water route is a 3-mile swim or to hang on to an inner tube while paddling through treacherous waters. Only some young men are fit enough to do that, and reportedly more than 50 have died during this invasion with many dead bodies seen floating in the water now.
CBS News interviewed migrants after arriving in Ceuta, and they explained that they spontaneously jumped in the water and swam the three miles. Crossing the Rio Grande River at our southern border is much easier than that, and President Trump pointed out that it will happen here if Democrats take control again.
No jobs awaited these rugged men upon their arrival, and it is inevitable that local laws will be violated as they look desperately for food, clothing, entertainment, and shelter. Thousands of these men roam the streets, and frightened residents sheltered inside while shops closed up, afraid of vandalism and looting.
One Ceuta resident, Rocío Gil, said on Spanish television that “as a woman, you have to live this to understand what it’s like. It’s an invasion … and there is no law.”
Sound familiar? Judicial rulings in the United States against sovereignty and border security here have caused similar travesties, including the admission of at least a million illegal migrants during each year of the Biden Administration.
President Trump has been trying hard to return migrants who have been here on Temporary Protected Status (TPS), as brought in primarily by Democrat presidents. But repeatedly lower federal judges have been blocking President Trump’s orders to deport illegal aliens, and to detain them for deportation without releasing them on bond.
The U.S. Supreme Court delivered a victory for Trump in late June by authorizing him to deport Haitians and others on TPS status without interference by lower court judges. The High Court said that these presidential decisions to deport are largely unreviewable and yet, not long after this decision was rendered, another federal district court judge blocked Trump again on this issue concerning Somalis.
Party’s Over for Foreigners at College
New rules announced by the Trump Administration are addressing the flood of foreign students at American universities. Half a million of them are illegal aliens, while more than a million additional college students are here from foreign countries on student visas.
Until recently many states, including Republican-controlled Texas, have allowed illegal aliens to benefit from low in-state tuition rates while Americans from out of state were forced to pay much higher rates. The unfair difference over four years can exceed $100,000 per student.
In July 2023 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled against a challenge to how a public Texas university charged only in-state tuition to illegal aliens, while charging much higher out-of-state tuition to American citizens. But in July of this year the same court upheld by a 2-1 vote a settlement with the Trump Administration whereby Texas agreed to stop enrolling illegal aliens at preferential tuition rates.
More than a million students in American universities are foreigners here on visa programs, almost entirely from non-Western countries having political systems unlike or opposed to ours. Texas has brought in many non-Christians as collegians and is reacting now against communities they’re forming.
Many of the international graduate students are receiving salaries or other compensation from American taxpayers, in the form of direct government subsidies at public universities and federal grants at private ones. Trump unsuccessfully attempted to cut off the flow of billions of dollars from the federal government to Harvard University.
For half a century foreigners could enter graduate programs and take many years, far more than 4, to complete their PhD programs while remaining in the U.S. without any deadline to leave. The F-1 visa program has been allowing foreigners to remain on visas here for the “duration of their status” at their university, with no time limit.
Trump has just ended this racket. Under a new rule issued by Trump’s Department of Homeland Security, most new F-1 students will receive visas that expire after a fixed period of time, usually four years.
This puts healthy pressure on universities and students to reach the finish line as scheduled, rather than dawdle indefinitely in the academic cocoon. The average length of time in graduate studies has ballooned to more than 7 years for a PhD, which harmfully causes students to delay having families and finding employment.
Trump is also cutting back on the period in which foreigners may linger in the U.S. after completing their programs, reducing it from 60 to 30 days. International students who line up jobs here can seek other visa programs, but most should be returning to their homelands.
Trump’s regulatory changes also restrict transfers by foreigners from one university to another, while here. Restrictions are being imposed on foreigners switching academic programs within their schools, too.
Graduate programs are generally funded by universities and government grants, so it is fair to question why there are any foreigners in these positions. Academic teaching positions are particularly scarce, such that in STEM fields there are academic jobs available for fewer than 10% of those who obtain PhDs.
Only 4.2% of applicants to Harvard College were admitted in its Class of 2029, which is the most recent data available. Every admission of a foreigner takes a spot away from an American applicant.
The blockbuster summer movie is The Odyssey, based on the ancient Greek classic that became a foundation of Western Civilization. Its concepts like the “Trojan horse” have become staples of our culture, and the Texas State Board of Education recently included this book in its new reading list of great texts including the Bible.
For decades movies have been shifting away from live-action films into animation. The popularity of The Odyssey as a live-action movie, along with the acclaim it has received from movie critics, demonstrates that the traditions of Western Civilization remain relevant and inspiring.
Yet most international students in our universities are from non-Western countries whose culture and traditions are entirely alien to American history, culture, and way of life. It would take several generations to assimilate the millions of foreigners already here, and a moratorium on new immigration should be seriously considered.
Universities are already complaining about a decline in international students in graduate programs, which they attribute to Trump’s occasional travel bans and freezing of some federal grants. The drop in high-school enrollment (which is mostly due to the declining birth rate) means there will be fewer American students in the pipeline for universities in the future.
But universities have only themselves to blame if there is a shortage of American students. Liberal political ideology dominant at universities leans strongly against child-rearing, and if more students are wanted for the future then there should be more encouragement now by academia for Americans to have and raise their children.
Update: Leftism Controlling Education
The largest teachers’ union, the National Education Association, held its annual convention over the July 4th weekend. Once again, its resolutions provide a horrifying glimpse of the leftist ideology that controls our public schools (and quite a few private schools, too).
Fifty delegates to this teachers’ convention submitted New Business Item 10: “The National Education Association will call for the impeachment, conviction, and removal of Donald Trump from the US Presidency.” This resolution seeks a “National March on Washington D.C. to remove Trump before the November 2026 midterm election.”
At a time when fewer than a third of fourth-graders can read at their grade level in public schools nationwide, teachers should focus more on education than on politics. Instead, they proposed spending $5 million in teachers’ dues on a highly publicized demonstration against President Trump just before voters head to the polls.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has presidential aspirations, so let’s look at how well his state schools are doing. A generation ago, when Ronald Reagan was governor, the sprawling University of California system was widely considered a crown jewel of public education.
But under Gov. Newsom’s tenure the University of California stopped using the standardized SAT and ACT scores in its admission process, and the result has been catastrophic. The Obama Administration’s Janet Napolitano, who was the high-salaried president of that system after serving as Obama’s Secretary of Homeland Security, admits that what she still insists was a “worthwhile experiment” to drop standardized admissions testing needs to be “revisited.”
Even the New York Times is appalled, devoting its entire editorial column on July 6th to explaining how that formerly great university betrayed its mission by adopting test-blind admissions in 2020. More than half the students who enter Cal Berkeley, its most prestigious campus, cannot solve elementary equations, such as finding the values of x for which x-squared is greater than 4, and its English Prof. Janet Sorensen observed that she “got students who could not write a sentence.”
The NEA spreads these errors nationwide. It is the largest labor union in the United States, having approximately 3 million members, which is more than enough to swing the outcome of a national election.
Its annual budget is based mostly on public employee dues, which are mandatory in many states, totaling about $400 million. It has a large staff of hundreds in its headquarters, which of course are located in Washington, D.C.
NEA members typically have summers off and thus lots of time to attend liberal conventions and campaign for Democrat candidates. Many teachers retire early with substantial pensions.
Roughly 10% of the delegates to the Democratic National Convention are public school teachers, so its platform as adopted every four years largely reflects the views of the NEA and its smaller rival, Randi Weingarten’s American Federation of Teachers. Both groups oppose laws that protect girls’ school sports against intrusion by biological boys who seek to compete with girls.
The U.S. Supreme Court recently rejected the NEA’s effort to force West Virginia to allow boys to compete as transgender girls in girls’ school sports. The NEA also wants to require schools to use opposite-sex pronouns demanded by transgender students.
Many Americans have been abandoning public schools in favor of alternatives, and the declining birth rate has contributed further to a drop in public school enrollment. Since 2020 there has been a decrease of 1.4 million public school students, creating pressure to close many schools and thereby requiring longer commutes by the students who remain.
But rather than becoming more mainstream to attract more students, the teachers’ unions continue to veer leftward and demand more funding. Dumping more money into the system has not improved it.
Liberal ideology in education has infested the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, at federal taxpayer expense. A new 162-page report by the White House Domestic Policy Council demonstrated for our Independence Day how far afield our treasured national museum system has strayed from our proud heritage.
Spearheaded by Vince Haley, this report observes that the Smithsonian Institute “has not met its obligations to the American people.” Entitled “Saving America’s Story” and subtitled “How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage,” the report condemns the shift “from straightforward historical education and scholarship toward an extreme political activism that seeks to transform our country.”
Examples provided in this report of the distortions of our history are indeed shocking. An 1840 statue of George Washington is depicted as merely “the perceived courage of the American people,” rather than the “exceptional courage of the American people” as often proven.
There is “no major exhibit dedicated to America’s founding era” at the Smithsonian Museum. Instead, many founders are disparaged for having some connection to slavery, despite how most worked to end the slave trade and to put slavery on a path to extinction.
Gen Z Turns to Socialism in Desperation
Gen Z men, the pivotal swing voters under age 30 who helped elect President Trump in 2024, are supporting socialist candidates in shocking numbers. As many as eight members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) could be elected to Congress in less than three months.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has a sky-high approval rating of 58%, more than double his disapproval rating, after Gen Z voters elected him in a landslide last fall. None of the conservative criticisms of him has made a dent in his popularity.
Some Republican consultants hope the Democrats’ shift to socialism will make it easier for Republican candidates to win in the general election. But there is no sign of a significant migration of traditional Democrats or Independents to the Republican Party.
It would help if more voters understood what the DSA really stands for. Their platform includes abolishing the Presidency, Senate and the Supreme Court, while opening our borders and emptying our prisons.
DSA members seek to abolish corporations and impose government rent-controlled housing. They want a “single payer” government-run health care system, which would cause Canadian-style shortages, and vow to “finish Reconstruction” by imposing a race-based woke agenda.
But explaining the DSA platform to young voters has not deterred them from casting ballots for the socialists. Instead, Republicans need to recognize that many young Americans are in dire financial straits, and seek to alleviate that.
Annual college tuition and expenses can exceed $100,000 at private colleges, yet D.C. politicians continue to pump money into higher education while doing nothing to bring down this exorbitant cost. Likewise for health care, such that insurance premiums surpass even mortgage payments for many young couples.
The job of government is not to impose price controls, but to rein in inflation. Yet the cost of groceries has risen by 33% since 2019.
A new Texas Public Opinion Research poll on the Senate race in Texas, which Republicans must win to keep control of the upper chamber, shows Democrat James Talarico leading the Republican Ken Paxton by 45-40%. By far the top issue for voters there is affordability and the cost of living, about which Gen Z is particularly distressed.
Mayor Mamdani’s approach to this problem is doomed to fail, as happened in Chicago, where 7 publicly subsidized Save A Lot stores are closing. Undeterred by this lesson, Mamdani promised that 5 city-operated grocery stores will sell a core basket of food at 30% less than privately owned stores, at prices fixed for an entire month to prevent the current sticker shock of many unexpected increases.
Mamdani’s first city-owned grocery store won’t open until next year in the Bronx, and the second one will not welcome shoppers until 2029, so this initiative is mostly symbolic. But to his credit, his stores will not sell lottery tickets, or alcohol and cigarettes.
The liberal Chicago Tribune, which supported the publicly funded scheme to address so-called “food deserts,” admits that “city-owned grocery stores … are not the answer.” Meanwhile, the German-owned Aldi chain, which somehow manages to sell a broad range of fresh foods and groceries at prices that average 30% less than other chains, recently announced a massive expansion with a target of 3,200 stores across the U.S.
But Republican officials have been creating an impression of pandering to oligarchs rather than making life more affordable for young people. Only 20% of Gen Z own stock outside of a retirement plan, and yet national policy seems devoted to what is good for the stock market rather than for the struggling consumer.
The Wall Street Journal recently published the best responses on this issue by members of Gen Z at college, and observations included the fact that wages have not kept pace with inflation since 2009. Rent eats up 40% of income, while medical debt is steep.
The debt that Gen Z men are incurring due to the growing addiction to gambling is staggering, too. Americans, mostly young men, are spending twice as much money on sports gambling now than on books, music, movies, and museums combined.
Congress held another ineffective hearing on the sports gambling crisis on July 21st, again failing to make progress on this issue. Meanwhile, gambling interests are suddenly pouring many millions of dollars into elections, such that many politicians are afraid to stand up against them.
Enter the socialists with their promises to protect and help Gen Z, by improving affordability, ending the oligarchy, and stopping predatory business practices. Sometimes the socialists deregulate, as Mamdani recently did for small businesses in New York City by terminating duplicative licensing requirements.
There is still time for Republicans to announce a new “Contract with America” that was so successful in the 1994 midterm election that it became a GOP landslide. The agenda should start with what would be good for Gen Z, the key voting bloc that should not be ignored any longer by the Republican Party.
