If You See Something, Say Something, But Also Prepare for a Lawsuit

June 14, 2016

This contention needs verification and further discussion in the days ahead:

Gilroy, a former Fort Pierce police officer, said Mateen frequently made homophobic and racial comments. Gilroy said he complained to his employer several times but it did nothing because he was Muslim. Gilroy quit after he said Mateen began stalking him via multiple text messages — 20 or 30 a day. He also sent Gilroy 13 to 15 phone messages a day, he said.

"I quit because everything he said was toxic," Gilroy said Sunday, "and the company wouldn't do anything. This guy was unhinged and unstable. He talked of killing people."

Remember the national brouhaha about the clock kid, and how "Islamophobic" everyone was that they treated a teenager bringing a box full of wires to school as a potential bomb threat? (The boy's family moved to Qatar shortly after the controversy.)

Noah Rothman points out a discussion American authorities don't want to have publicly: they can't simultaneous tell people "if you see something, say something" and let them be potentially accused of discrimination or racism if it turns out to be a false alarm.

The common thread among suspects in these mass shootings and terroristic incidents is not merely mental health issues and an attraction to extremist political ideologies. In each case, the concerned people in those killers' lives failed to speak up or their warnings were dismissed when they did. For all legitimate concerns regarding the allure of political extremism and the ubiquity of deadly weapons, few seem concerned about the nearly canonical tenets of non-judgmentalism. A cultural proscription on appearing to be prying or condemnatory has its drawbacks; one of them is that people who "see something" often don't "say something," or they are ignored when they do.

If the [sic] America's preventative approach to terrorism is to deputize its citizens as members of a national neighborhood watch, authorities had better be prepared to listen and to act to them when they see something of concern.

Meanwhile, Down on the Border . . .

Don't look now, but Central America thinks we're running a day care again:

"We're at the limit of our resources," Humberto Roque Villanueva, Mexico's deputy interior minister responsible for migration, told Reuters.

The number of families stopped at the U.S.-Mexico border jumped 122 percent between October 2015 and April 2016 from the same period a year earlier, according to data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

The number of detained "unaccompanied minors" — children traveling without relatives — was 74 percent higher. Most of the Central Americans come from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

Despite those increases, fewer migrants are being caught as they move through Mexico. Over the same period, Mexico detained and deported about 5 percent fewer people than in 2014/15. So far this year, 3.5 percent fewer unaccompanied minors have been stopped.

Middle-class Chinese, who can pay $50,000 to $70,000 per head to smugglers, are crossing the border as well:

Chinese immigrants are increasingly trying to cross illegally into the United States through Mexico — in fact, the number has soared in the last two years, according to the Los Angeles Times. . . .

Border Patrol spokeswoman Wendi Lee told the Times that the trend started in earnest only recently.

Some 663 Chinese immigrants were arrested by Border Patrol between last October and May – a huge jump from the 48 arrested in all of fiscal year 2015 (that ran from October, 2014 to September, 2015), and only eight the previous fiscal year.

Prior to 2014, Lee said, "We just weren't getting [Chinese nationals]."

At those prices, it sounds like those Chinese are getting ripped off compared to some others:

Mexican authorities say migrant traffickers have adopted a new trick to smuggle Central American clients to the U.S. border: renting high-end tour buses.

Mexico's Immigration Institute says it has found 102 migrants on two buses being used to whisk them across the length of the country.

The migrants reported paying between $7,000 and $10,000 to go from an area near the Guatemalan border to Reynosa, a city across from McAllen, Texas.

Coming soon: luxury illegal immigration!

Why the 'Brexit' Matters on This Side of the Atlantic

In a little more than a week, Great Britain will vote in a referendum whether or not to remain in the European Union — the "Brexit" (British exit). This may seem like a faraway concern to a lot of Americans, but the issue touches on a lot of hotly debated concerns and questions right here in the U.S. today: Who makes the rules in our society? Who decides whether an economy is "working" or not? How closely do we want to be tied to countries and cultures that are dramatically different from our own? Who's allowed to enter and stay?

This morning brings news that leaving the EU is supported by 60 percent . . . of the Spice Girls. "Say you'll be there"? Apparently not!

Douglas Murray explains why being economically tied to Europe doesn't look so appealing to many British voters:

The euro-zone crises that have battered the Continent since 2009 vindicated every British Euroskeptic fear. As one southern European country after another found itself unable to refinance its debts, the euro zone became a raft of the Medusa. In an effort to impose fiscal restraint on the southern European countries, northern European countries, especially Germany, not only imposed further financial rules on their neighbors but ousted their elected leaders, imposing bureaucrats to run things on Brussels's behalf. Even now, youth unemployment in these countries sits between 25 and 50 percent, blighting an entire generation.

As events in Greece keep showing, these southern countries retain the ability to crash the entire continent at any moment. After lying their way into the euro zone (they cooked their books to mask the weakness of their financial state) and then refusing to impose sufficient austerity while inside it, the Greeks unwittingly demonstrated what the Euroskeptics had long warned about. In any ordinary financial arrangement, a country such as Greece should have been thrown out of the union and allowed to return to its own currency, devalue, and then climb its way out of recession in the usual manner. The EU's refusal to allow Greece to do this was just one reminder that the euro project — like everything else the EU does — was never about economics so much as it was about politics. The economics could not be allowed to fail, because the political project could not be allowed to fail. A Greek exit from the euro zone risked pushing other countries to exit. So despite its failure, the euro zone stays together even now, with the effects felt even outside it. The EU today, as IMF figures show, remains the only region of the world to be consistently experiencing zero economic growth.

Another huge issue in this debate is . . . border security, and that sure as heck sounds familiar to Americans:

After hundreds of thousands of undocumented people walked across the territory of Hungary and other countries, and even more so after the terrorist attacks in Paris and Belgium this past year, Europe's borders have begun to go back up. Now even Frans Timmermans, vice president of the European Commission, admits what everybody with eyes could tell: that most of the people — his figure is 60 percent — who arrived last year came from countries where there is no conflict. They are not refugees but economic migrants with no right to claim asylum. They have no more reason to be in Europe than does any other non-European in the world. What is one to do with an entity able to make such historic missteps and so unable to correct them?

Americans already feel like Washington doesn't listen to their concerns or care about the problems in their communities; I can only imagine how residents of the United Kingdom feel about a governing and regulatory body that is set up in Brussels, Belgium. Great Britain has 73 out of 751 seats in the European Parliament. If you believe that government closest to the people is most likely to make the best decisions, then a British departure sounds like a step in the right direction.

But as Americans, it's really not our decision, and we probably ought to give our longtime allies some space to work this out for themselves. Unfortunately, we've seen some unseemly lobbying from the Obama administration:

The Obama administration has even resorted to unseemly threats should Great Britain vote to leave the EU. President Barack Obama has warned that Great Britain will have to go to "the back of the queue" on trade negotiations should it vote to leave the EU. And U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman has warned the British electorate that "We're not particularly in the market for free trade agreements with individual countries."

Truth be told, the United States has several free trade agreements with individual countries. These countries include Israel, South Korea, Morocco and Chile. Froman might find this information useful in his role as trade representative.

Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen and some other folks at the Reserve make a British exit sound harmful to the United States:

In her speech the Fed chair said: "A UK vote to exit the European Union could have significant economic repercussions."

She stressed that investors' "appetite for risk" could change quickly and that a UK exit from the EU would be likely to affect market sentiment.

Ms Yellen's remarks echo comments from other economists about the impact of a Brexit on the US economy.

On Friday Lael Brainard, a member of the Fed's board of governors, suggested that a Brexit could have a "significant adverse reaction" to the US market.

"Because international financial markets are tightly linked, an adverse reaction in European financial markets could affect US financial markets, and, through them, real activity in the United States," Ms. Brainard said.

But do we have the right to ask our longtime ally to stay in an economic agreement they don't like, for the sake of our own prosperity? Haven't our friends earned the right to make their own decisions, even if it is a mistake?

ADDENDA: The latest tactic of pro-gun-control congressional Democrats: Shouting during moments of silence.

Just toss these guys out. They have no respect for anyone but themselves. They can see nothing beyond their own moral supremacy and preening solipsism.