Category Archives: Terror

Iran’s 800km Ballistic Missile, Did Anyone Notice?

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It is no wonder that Prime Minister Netanyahu cancelled his meeting with Obama this month.

In part USAToday: WASHINGTON — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has canceled his trip to Washington this month, prompting annoyance and surprise from White House officials who said they had been working to schedule a meeting with President Obama.

The incident is just the latest outward sign of tension between the two leaders, who also missed out on a meeting a year ago as Netanyahu addressed a joint meeting of Congress to voice his opposition to the Iran nuclear deal. The White House said a meeting then wouldn’t have been appropriate because it was just two weeks before Netanyahu faced a re-election bid.

The dust-up comes as Vice President Biden touched down in Tel Aviv on Tuesday during his week-long visit to the Middle East. He’s scheduled to meet with Netanyahu on Wednesday. The two countries are in the midst of renegotiating a 10-year security agreement.

The White House said the Israeli government first initiated talks about a meeting this month, requesting a meeting of the two leaders March 17 or March 18. The White House had offered March 18 — two days before Obama’s trip to Cuba and Argentina when the trip was canceled.

“We were looking forward to hosting the bilateral meeting, and we were surprised to first learn via media reports that the prime minister, rather than accept our invitation, opted to cancel his visit,” said Ned Price, the spokesman for Obama’s National Security Council. “Reports that we were not able to accommodate the prime minister’s schedule are false.” Full article here.

TEHRAN (Tasnim) – The Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) fired a 800-km range ballistic missile, dubbed Qiam, from an underground silo during a nationwide missile exercise on Tuesday.   

According to Tasnim dispatches, one of the projectiles launched from a silo on Tuesday was Qiam, a ballistic missile with pinpoint accuracy.  

A report broadcast by the state television showed missile silos at seemingly impregnable underground facilities, full of advanced missiles. The underground silos are seen as complementary gear for the IRGC’s underground “missile cities.”  

In comments on the sidelines of the drill, codenamed ‘Might of Velayat’, IRGC Commander Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari said the launch of various types of missiles in the exercise was only a slight indication that the IRGC’s missile silos, scattered all over the country, are fully operational. The missile drill has been in progress for a couple of days, but its final stage kicked off on Tuesday in different parts of the country. 

According to the IRGC, the exercise is meant to demonstrate Iran’s might and sustainable security in light of unity, convergence, empathy and harmony.

Iran Threatens to Walk Away From Nuke Deal After New Missile Test

Islamic Republic breached international agreements by test-firing ballistic missiles


FreeBeacon: Iran on Tuesday again threatened to walk away from the nuclear agreement reached last year with global powers, hours after the country breached international agreements by test-firing ballistic missiles.

Iran’s most recent ballistic missile test, which violates current U.N. Security Council resolutions, comes a day after the international community’s nuclear watchdog organization disclosed that it is prohibited by the nuclear agreement from publicly reporting on potential violations by Iran.

Iranian leaders now say that they are poised to walk away from the deal if the United States and other global powers fail to advance the Islamic Republic’s “national interests.”

“If our interests are not met under the nuclear deal, there will be no reason for us to continue,” Abbas Araqchi, Iran’s deputy foreign minister, warned during remarks delivered to a group of Iranian officials in Tehran.

“If other parties decide, they could easily violate the deal,” Araqchi was quoted as saying by Iran’s state-controlled media. “However, they know this will come with costs.”

Araqchi appeared to allude to the United States possibly leveling new economic sanctions as a result of the missile test. The Obama administration moved forward with new sanctions earlier this year as a result of the country’s previous missile tests.

Iran’s latest missile test drew outrage from longtime regime critics on Capitol Hill.

“The administration’s response to Iran’s new salvo of threatening missile tests in violation of international law cannot once again be, it’s ‘not supposed to be doing that,’” Sen. Mark Kirk (R., Ill.) said in a statement. “Now is the time for new crippling sanctions against Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Ministry of Defense, Aerospace Industries Organization, and other related entities driving the Iranian ballistic missile program.”

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) warned that the nuclear agreement has done little to moderate Iran’s rogue behavior.

“Far from pushing Iran to a more moderate engagement with its neighbors, this nuclear deal is enabling Iran’s aggression and terrorist activities,” McCarthy said in a statement. “Sanctions relief is fueling Iran’s proxies from Yemen to Iraq to Syria to Lebanon. Meanwhile, Khamenei and the Iranian regime are acting with impunity because they know President Obama will not hold them accountable and risk the public destruction of his nuclear deal, the cornerstone of the president’s foreign policy legacy.”

McCarthy went on to demand that the Obama administration step forward with new sanctions as punishment for the missile test.

Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department had difficulty Monday explaining why the nuclear agreement limits public reporting by the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, on potential deal violations by Iran.

Yukiya Amano, the IAEA’s chief, disclosed on Monday that his agency is no longer permitted to release details about Iran’s nuclear program and compliance with the deal. The limited public reporting is a byproduct of the nuclear agreement, according to Amano.

When asked about these comments again Tuesday, a State Department official told the Free Beacon that the IAEA’s reports would continue to provide a complete picture of Iran’s nuclear program, though it remains unclear if this information will be made publicly available.

“There isn’t less stringent monitoring or reporting on Iran’s nuclear program,” the official said. “The IAEA’s access to Iran’s nuclear program and its authorization to report on it has actually expanded. It’s a distortion to say that if there is less detail in the first and only post-Implementation Day IAEA report then that somehow implies less stringent monitoring or less insight into Iran’s nuclear program.”

While the IAEA “needs to report on different issues” under the final version of the nuclear agreement, the agency continues to provide “a tremendous amount of information about Iran’s current, much smaller nuclear program,” the source maintained.

The IAEA’s most recent February report—which was viewed by nuclear experts as incomplete and short on detail—“accurately portrays the status of Iran’s nuclear program,” including its efforts to uphold the nuclear deal, the official added.

“We expect this professional level of reporting to continue in the future,” the official said.

 

 

 

 

IAEA Obstructed from Reporting Iran Violations

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 Hey  you have a call holding on line 3.

IAEA: Iran Nuke Deal Limits Public Reporting on Possible Violations

Nuclear watchdog says deal limits agency oversight

FreeBeacon: The head of the international community’s nuclear watchdog organization disclosed Monday that certain agreements reached under the Iran nuclear deal limit inspectors from publicly reporting on potential violations by the Islamic Republic.

Yukiya Amano, chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, which is responsible for ensuring Iran complies with the agreement, told reporters that his agency is no longer permitted to release details about Iran’s nuclear program and compliance with the deal.

Amano’s remarks come on the heels of a February IAEA oversight report that omitted many details and figures related to Iran’s nuclear program. The report sparked questions from outside nuclear experts and accusations from critics that the IAEA was not being transparent with its findings.

Amano disclosed in response to questions from reporters that the last report was intentionally vague because the nuclear agreement prohibits the IAEA from publishing critical data about Iran’s program that had been disclosed by the agency in the past.

“The misunderstanding is that the basis of reporting is different,” Amano said. “In the previous reports, the bases were the previous [United Nations] Security Council Resolutions and Board of Governors. But now they are terminated. They are gone.”

Most U.N. measures pertaining to Iran—including its military buildup and illicit work on nuclear technology—were removed following the nuclear agreement, which essentially rewrote the organization’s overall approach to the country.

The IAEA, which operates under the U.N. umbrella, must now follow the new resolutions governing the implementation of the nuclear pact, Amano said.

“These two resolutions and the other resolutions of the Security Council and Board are very different,” he said. “And as the basis is different, the consequences are different.”

Amano said that going forward, the agency would only release reports that are consistent with the most recent Security Council resolutions on Iran, meaning that future reports are likely to impact the international community’s ability to determine if Iran is fully complying with its end of the agreement.

Last month’s report was viewed as particularly significant because it allowed the nuclear agreement to proceed to its implementation stage. However, the dearth of information in it has angered some experts.

The latest report “provides insufficient details on important verification and monitoring issues,” Olli Heinonen, the IAEA’s former deputy director general, stated in a policy brief.

“The report does not list inventories of nuclear materials and equipment or the status of key sites and facilities,” Heinonen said in his analysis, which was published by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “Without detailed reporting, the international community cannot be sure that Iran is upholding its commitments under the nuclear deal.”

The IAEA’s latest report also failed to disclose information about Iran’s stockpiles of low-enriched uranium, which is supposed to be significantly reduced as part of the nuclear deal.

Additional information about Iran’s nuclear centrifuges, the machines responsible for enriching uranium, also was withheld by the IAEA.

Other critics accused the Obama administration of misleading Congress during negotiations over the deal. White House officials maintained at the time that the agreement would provide increased transparency into Iran’s nuclear endeavors.

“When nuclear negotiations began in late 2013, the administration asked Congress to stand down on pressuring the Iranians, and promised to force the Iranians to dismantle significant parts of their nuclear program if Congress gave negotiators space,” Omri Ceren, an official with The Israel Project, which works with Congress on the Iran issue, wrote in an analysis sent to reporters on Monday.

“U.S. negotiators eventually caved on any demands that would have required the destruction of Iran’s uranium infrastructure, and instead went all-in on verification and transparency: Yes, the Iranians would get to keep what they’d built, and yes, their program would eventually be fully legal, but the international community would have full transparency into everything from uranium mining to centrifuge production to enriched stockpiles,” Ceren explained.

However, “now Amano has revealed that the nuclear deal gutted the ability of journalists and the public to have insight into Iran’s nuclear activities,” he said. “In critical areas, it’s not even clear that the IAEA has been granted the promised access.”

****

What else does Kerry know about Iran and their history?

Fresh evidence emerging of Iran’s deadly nuclear and terror ties to Argentina

Amb. Noriega: Last week, an Argentine intelligence official testified that Iran sought nuclear technology from that South American country and that a prosecutor investigating suspected Hezbollah bombings in Buenos Aires had been murdered for attempting to expose Tehran’s dangerous plot.

This fresh testimony supports reports I published in July 2011 regarding suspicious nuclear diplomacy in 2007 and a massive cash transfer in 2010 involving then Iranian and Argentine leaders, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Nestor Kirchner, respectively. Despite congressional inquiries and mounting evidence, the State Department has chosen to ignore this blind spot in strategy for containing Iran’s illicit nuclear program.

According to the Argentine daily newspaper, Clarin, a former Argentine senior intelligence official, Antonio Stiuso, confirmed in two days of testimony before a judge that the former president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, interceded with Nestor Kirchner to resume nuclear cooperation with Iran, which had been suspended in 1991. Also, according to Stiuso’s testimony, Ahmadinejad was interested in using Argentina’s technology to produce plutonium bombs, which he characterized as more sophisticated than the ones Iran was trying to make with enriched uranium.

Stiuso noted that Venezuela did not possess the technical knowledge to make use of the nuclear technology sought by Chávez from Argentina. Instead, because Iran’s nuclear plans were designed by Argentines in the 1960s, Stiuso’s theory is that Tehran was the ultimate beneficiary of such nuclear cooperation.

 

Stiuso also testified that the former prosecutor, Alberto Nisman, was murdered for refusing an order from former president Cristina Kirchner to cease investigating Iran’s role in the 1992 and 1994 bombings and its corrupt dealings with Argentine officials. In a draft criminal complaint discovered after the prosecutor was found dead last year in an apparently staged suicide, Nisman accused Cristina Kirchner of covering up the involvement of five Iranians who have been charged with planning the 1994 terrorist attack against the Jewish Community Center in the heart of Argentina’s capital city.

In a separate development, last Thursday, Nisman’s family disclosed a written statement by a prosecutor from Argentina’s federal appeals court saying that scientific tests failed to find evidence that he fired the pistol found near his body. This is the first formal statement by a government official confirming suspicions that Nisman was the victim of a homicide.

From the US side, the Obama State Department has systematically neglected the dangerous liaisons among Venezuela, Argentina, and Iran. As dramatic evidence of Iran’s deadly provocations in our own neighborhood continues to come to light, it is fair to ask whether its cluelessness was by accident or design. … Much more here.

 

Carlos the Jackal, the PLO and Switzerland

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JPost: ZURICH – Carlos the Jackal, the Marxist guerrilla who became a symbol of Cold War anti-imperialism, has told a newspaper that he moved freely through Switzerland in the 1970s under a “non-aggression pact” between the government and the Palestine Liberation Organization.

He felt so safe that he flew to Zurich rather than Vienna airport on his way to neighboring Austria for his most spectacular coup: the kidnapping of oil ministers at OPEC headquarters in 1975, he told the Neue Zuercher Zeitung (NZZ) in a telephone interview from his prison in France.

His comments, published on Monday, seem sure to inflame a debate about whether Swiss authorities secretly agreed to turn a blind eye to PLO activity in the 1970s and give it diplomatic support in exchange for an end to attacks on Swiss targets.

The NZZ said it had made contact with the 66-year-old Venezuelan, whose real name is Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, through his lawyer. Ramirez is serving life sentences in France for a series of attacks.

He told the paper it had been common knowledge among PLO militants that they would not be arrested in Switzerland, on condition was that they refrained from making trouble. “Of course we stuck to that,” he said.

He recalled seeing a wanted poster with his picture on it in the guard’s booth as he stood in line for passport checks after flying into Zurich from Beirut on his way to Vienna, only to be waved through with his fake South American passport.

Ramirez sealed his notoriety by taking OPEC’s oil ministers hostage in the name of the Palestinian struggle, in an attack in which three people were killed, and went on to be an international gun-for-hire with Soviet bloc protectors.

But the revolutionary mystique he once enjoyed – helped by a Che Guevara beret, leather jacket and dark glasses – wore thin after he was captured in Khartoum in 1994 by French special forces.

Switzerland last month began looking into whether a former government minister, now dead, had struck a covert deal with the PLO.

The allegation emerged this year in a book by Swiss journalist Marcel Gyr, who conducted the NZZ interview. The book, “Swiss Terror Years”, has also raised questions about whether such a pact interfered with an investigation into the bombing of a Swissair plane in 1970 that killed 47 people, for which no one was ever charged.

*** Plausible? Seems so…..

 

Named “Ilich” as a paeon to Lenin (whose full name was Vladimir Ilyich Lenin) by his Marxist father, Ramirez was later known as Carlos the Jackal. His nickname came in part from the novel, The Day of the Jackal, a thriller once found by authorities among his belongings.

Background:

Born in 1949 in Caracas, Venezuela, where he was raised. He was also schooled in England, and attended university in Moscow. After his expulsion from the university in 1970, he joined the Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a pan-Arab leftist group then based in Amman, Jordan.

Claim to Notoriety:

Ramirez’ most famous terrorist move was the takeover of OPEC headquarters in Vienna at a 1975 Conference, where he also took 11 members hostage. The hostages were eventually transported to Algiers and freed. Although later debunked, assumptions that Ramirez had a hand in killing two of the Israeli athletes taken hostage at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich added to his reputation as a ruthless and effective terrorist.

Indeed, many of Ramirez’ feats had murky origins and unclear goals and sponsors—which also gave the self-proclaimed terrorist a mysterious glamour.

A 1994 review of David Yallop’s Tracking the Jackal: The Search for Carlos, the World’s Most Wanted Man suggests that the OPEC kidnappings may have been sponsored by Saddam Hussein, rather than by the PFLP, as has been suggested, or by Libyan leader Muammar Al Qaddafi:

Although it has long been thought that the armed attack on a Vienna meeting of the oil cartel and the kidnapping of 11 of the oil ministers were conceived and paid for by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the book makes a persuasive case that behind it was actually Saddam Hussein, seeking an increase in the price of oil to finance his impending war with Iran.

Mr. Hussein intended Carlos to use the kidnapping as a pretext to assassinate the Saudi opponents of a price rise, Mr. Yallop says, but the unreliable Carlos sold out his employer, as he so often did, and instead took a $20 million ransom from the Saudi Government (the hostages were in fact released).

Where He Is Now:

The Jackal was arrested by the French in 1994, in Sudan where he was living. He was convicted for several murders in 1997 and as of 2006 is still in prison.

Cross-Links:

Ramirez has expressed admiration for Osama bin Laden from prison, and more broadly for Revolutionary Islam, which is the title of a 2003 book he published from prison. In it, the jailed terrorist showed shades of his lifelong affiliation with leftist secular groups whose vision of conflict is shaped by class differences describing Islam as the sole “transnational force capable of standing up the ‘enslavement of nations.”

Trump and the Phony “Job-Creating” EB-5 Scam

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Thank you Michelle, I hope those dedicated researchers that did all that grand work on Obama, too late in the game, don’t do it a second time….

Malkin: Ugh: Trump and the Phony “Job-Creating” EB-5 Green Card Racket

By: Michelle Malkin

CR: Whelp. It appears that one of Donald Trump’s projects helped make America great… by soliciting an estimated $50 million from Chinese investors using the fraud-riddled EB-5 green card program for politically connected cronies.

This is the same racket exploited by Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, lobbied for by Nevada Sen. Harry Reid and DHS official Alejandro Mayorkas, and embraced by South Dakota Republican officials. It’s a scam I’ve reported on for years.

Bloomberg News has the new story on how EB-5 funded a Trump-branded tower in New Jersey. In a nutshell:

Trump Bay Street is a 50-story luxury rental apartment building being built by Kushner Companies, whose chief executive officer, Jared Kushner, is married to Trump’s daughter Ivanka. It will have an outdoor pool, indoor golf simulator and sweeping views of Lower Manhattan; it adjoins an existing high rise condo, Trump Plaza Residence. The firm that was hired to seek investors, US Immigration Fund, is run by Florida developer Nicholas Mastroianni, who announced a partnership last year with a Trump golf course in Jupiter, Florida.

The visa program is known as EB-5. In exchange for investing at least $500,000 in a project promising to create jobs, foreigners receive a two-year visa with a good chance of obtaining permanent residency for them and their families. In 2014, the most recent year for which records are available, the U.S. issued 10,692 of these visas — 85% to people from China.

The Jersey City project has raised $50 million, about a quarter of its funding, from loans obtained through EB-5, according to a slide presentation by US Immigration Fund. Mark Giresi, general counsel of US Immigration Fund, said he believed nearly all of the EB-5 investors in the Trump project were from China.

A Trump spokesperson said the presidential candidate was not a partner in the financing deal. A Kushner flack told Bloomberg News the project was “entirely legal and creating jobs.”

But in my longtime investigations and in Sold Out, my book with John Miano, the evidence is clear: EB-5’s job creation claims are as phony and manufactured as fuzzy porkulus math, H-1B lobbyists’ math, and corporate welfare/economic development subsidies math.

Since 2001, I’ve warned about the systemic and bipartisan corruption of America’s EB-5 immigrant investor visa program. The program puts America up for sale to the most politically connected bidders.

Created under an obscure section of the expansionist Immigration Act of 1990, EB-5 promised bountiful economic development for the U.S. in exchange for granting permanent residency (and eventual American citizenship) to foreign investors. The law allows 10,000 alien entrepreneurs a year to obtain green cards by investing between $500,000 and $1 million in new commercial enterprises or troubled businesses. After two years, foreign investors, their spouses, and their children can receive “conditional permanent resident” status for two years and a gateway to permanent U.S. citizenship.

Originally, the law required individual investments in commercial enterprises to directly generate at least 10 new full-time jobs. Investors were expected to manage the businesses themselves and dedicate some of the newly-created jobs to exports. Failure would mean loss of their money and their business. In 1992, Congress created the “Immigrant Investor Pilot Program” and established government-approved EB-5 “regional centers” — specially selected business groups and corporate entities designated to administer EB-5 investments and oversee a much more relaxed definition of job creation.

The idea was to pool investor funds in a defined industry and targeted region to promote economic growth. Under this loan model, the regional center would recruit and collect funding from a group of foreign investors, then turn around and lend the money to selected projects at a low interest rate. The project would then pay off the loan over an agreed period of time. In targeted areas of high unemployment, the threshold for investment was lowered.

There are currently 614 such regional centers approved by the feds. Participation in the program has risen from 5,748 visa winners in 2008 to 22,444 in 2014. EB-5 participants in these joint ventures can fulfill job-creation requirements if they “create or preserve” either direct jobs or “indirect” jobs shown to be “created collaterally or as a result of capital invested in a commercial enterprise affiliated with a regional center by an EB-5 investor.” The five-year “pilot program,” which has been reauthorized routinely since its inception, was extended last year until September 2016.

As John and I reported, early EB-5 boosters used various theoretical multipliers to hype the program’s benefits, predicting that “4 million millionaire investors along with family members, would sign up, bringing in $4 billion in new investments and creating 40,000 jobs [annually].” In 2011, President Obama’s Council on Job Competitiveness regurgitated the same, old figures in its call to “radically expand” the program:

If the EB-5 program reaches maximum capacity, it could result annually in the creation of approximately 4,000 new businesses, $2 billion to $4 billion of foreign investment capital, and create 40,000 jobs.

But in practice, like so many of the Beltway’s immigration programs, EB-5’s ever-evolving regulations are Byzantine and arbitrary. Fraud and abuse are rampant. Unsurprisingly, the purported economic benefits of EB-5 are woefully dubious. One sensible journalist, Charles Lane, put the EB-5 promoters’ claims in proper perspective:

“Sounds impressive,” he explained, “until you realize that foreign investment in the United States totals $2.5 trillion and that the program’s fuzzy job-creation count includes jobs ‘indirectly’ attributable to the investment. EB-5 would be dubious policy even if it could claim five times that impact. Simply put, it is corporate welfare — yet another attempt to subsidize the flow of capital into politically favored channels.”

Center for Immigration Studies analyst David North adds that “foreign investment comes to the United States routinely, in large volume, with minuscule help from EB-5.” In 2010, he observed, total foreign investment in the United States increased by $1.9 trillion, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce. Based on the investors’ green card applications filed two years after the first investment, North estimated that “EB-5 investment that year was about $191 million, and that was a well above-average year for the program. So, for every $100 of increased foreign investment that year, the EB-5 program contributed about one penny [emphasis added].”

Beltway cronyism was embedded in EB-5’s DNA from the get-go. The original Democratic House sponsor and his spokesman went on to establish for-profit companies that marketed the program and provided consulting services. Former federal immigration officials from the George H.W. Bush administration formed lucrative limited partnerships to cash in on their access and EB-5 expertise.

Key supporters of the original immigrant investor visa program included Democrat Sens. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., and Paul Simon, D-Ill. Big Government Republicans embraced it, too. Prescott Bush, George W. Bush’s uncle, was on the board of American Immigration Services, one of the leading EB-5 visa vendors. So was former President Bush’s Immigration and Naturalization Service commissioner, Gene McNeary. GOP Sen. Mitch McConnell worked closely with the woman who was instrumental in drafting the EB-5 law: Maria Hsia.

That final name should ring a bell. Hsia was a Simon and McConnell donor identified by the House Governmental Affairs Committee as “an agent of the Chinese government.” In 2000, she was found guilty by a federal jury of laundering more than $100,000 in illegal donations to the Democratic National Committee through the infamous Hsi Lai Buddhist temple in California. At the time, Funny Money Honey Hsia was working for McConnell and others on the 1990 immigration bill, she also worked for a campaign fund-raising group called the Pacific Leadership Council. Hsia co-founded the PLC with Lippo Bank officials John Huang and James Riady, the chief figures in the Clinton-Gore Donorgate scandal convicted of campaign-finance crimes. At least six Lippo Bank officials reportedly benefited from the EB-5 law. Hsia partnered with former Democratic Rep. Bruce A. Morrison of Connecticut, an immigration lawyer, author of the 1990 Immigration Act in the House, and main sponsor of EB-5. After leaving Congress to run (unsuccessfully) for governor in Connecticut, Morrison formed a business to market the investor visa program.

An entire side industry of economic book-cookers has arisen to supply analyses of the “job creation” benefits of EB-5 projects and to gerrymander Census employment data to fit the program’s definition of “targeted employment areas” in order to qualify for lower investment thresholds (as was done in New York City’s Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park EB-5 deal).

Think Solyndra and federal stimulus math on steroids.

How does Trump respond to the debunking of the bogus job-creation math upon which the entire cash-for-citizenship swindle rests? Have any other Trump projects been subsidized by EB-5 China money? Where are the other GOP candidates on the issue and will they join Capitol Hill calls to kill the program?

If the RNC-organized, corporate media-controlled GOP debates weren’t such clown shows, maybe American voters could get some answers.

 

 

 

Not 11 Million but 15.7 Million

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Gang of Eight Legislation Includes Amnesty and Massive Increases to Legal Immigration and Guest-Worker Programs

The outline also details significant changes to the legal immigration process that will likely result in millions of additional green cards over the first 10 years. The bill will clear the current backlog of foreign nationals that have been approved for a green card but are years away from receiving them because of annual limits or per-country caps. The goal is to issue green cards to the 4.5 million individuals waiting in line within the first 10 years, so the Gang of Eight can claim that those in the “legal” line will get their green cards before the illegal aliens become eligible.

The bill will also create a new merit-based green cards category where temporary visa holders can earn points based on certain criteria. Visa holders with the most amount of points will receive a green card. The plan calls for up to 250,000 new green cards each year through the merit-based program.

Illegal aliens that are adjusted to RPI status will be allowed to apply for a green card through the merit-based program after 10 years if certain “triggers” are met, however, illegal aliens that qualify for the DREAM Act can receive instant citizenship after 5 years and illegal aliens that work a required number of hours in agriculture can receive a green card in 5 years.

Green cards for the rest of the illegal-alien population will be granted after 10 years if all employers use E-Verify, DHS has completed the entry/exit system at sea and air ports (land ports are excluded), and if DHS is apprehending 90% of illegal border crossers in high risk border sectors.

The bill also creates a new temporary, low-skilled guest-worker program, expands the annual number of H-1B visas issued to high-skilled immigrants, and creates a new guest-worker program for farmers. All temporary visa holders will be eligible for green cards through the new merit-based green card category.

The bill also lifts the annual green card caps on extraordinary workers, multinational executives, and doctoral degree holders in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.  Much more here.

Record 61 million immigrants in U.S., 15.7 million illegally

WashingtonExaminer: There are a record 61 million immigrants and their American-born children in the United States, including an estimated 15.7 million illegally here, according to a new analysis of 2015 U.S. Census data.

The estimated number of undocumented immigrants is one of the highest ever.

The analysis by the Center for Immigration Studies found that 45.3 million, or three-fourths of the 61 million, are legal immigrants and their children. The report out Monday notes that the so-called “Gang of Eight” immigration bill supported by GOP presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio would have doubled that number of legal immigrants.

“These numbers raise profound questions that are seldom even asked: What number of immigrants can be assimilated? What is the absorption capacity of our schools, health care system, infrastructure, and labor market? What is the effect on the environment and quality of life from significantly increasing the nation’s population density?” wrote Steven Camarota, the Center’s director of Research.

“With 45 million legal immigrants and their young children already here, does it make sense to continue admitting more than one million new legal permanent immigrants every year?” he added.

His report found that the normal pattern of immigration to the United States changed after 1970. At that time, there were 13.5 million immigrants, or about one in 15 U.S. residents.

But since 2000, the number of immigrants has increased 18.4 million, and now nearly one of every five U.S. residents are immigrants.

“The number of immigrants and their young children grew six times faster than the nation’s total population from 1970 to 2015 — 353 percent vs. 59 percent,” he added.

Camarota dug deep into Census Current Population Survey and other data to determine his estimate of 15.7 million illegals in the United States.

“Our best estimate is that in 2015 there were 5.1 million children with at least one illegal immigrant parent. Taken together, the best available evidence indicates that there were a total of 15.7 million illegal immigrants and their U.S.-born children in the adjusted December 2015 CPS, accounting for 25.7 percent of the 61 million immigrants and their children in the country,” he said.

He broke the figures down state by state and Camarota said that “the number of immigrants and their minor children from 1970 to 2015 has been nothing short of astonishing.” Some examples:

— In Georgia, this population grew 3,058 percent (from 55,000 to 1.75 million), 25 times faster than the overall state population.

— In Nevada, this population grew 3,002 percent (from 26,000 to 821,000), six times faster than the overall state population.

— In North Carolina, this population grew 2,937 percent (from 47,000 to 1.43 million), 30 times faster than the overall state population.

*** In all fairness, Rubio is not the only Senator to hold exclusive blame. Imagine the true negotiations and what was omitted.

Back in 2013: 

Morning Bell:10 Problems with the Gang of Eight Immigration Bill, DailySignal:

10Probs_immig_v3