If 1 In 5 Fairfax Residents Is Illegal, We Need Mass Deportations In Virginia Immediately
Contra enthusiasts for lawlessness, a great way to improve American neighborhoods would be to arrest, detain, and deport all illegal aliens.Contra enthusiasts for lawlessness, a great way to improve American neighborhoods would be to arrest, detain, and deport all illegal aliens.Libertarian elites attack Trump for delivering the immigration wins Americans want
The United States suffered a costly and deadly "invasion" at its southern border during the Biden administration.
Over the course of Joe Biden's tenure as president, U.S. Customs and Border Protection recorded roughly 11 million border encounters with illegal aliens and other inadmissible migrants — encounters that in many cases ended with the release of border jumpers into the homeland.
The Trump administration has, however, turned things around.
'These bans affected half of all legal immigrants coming from abroad.'
Whereas, for instance, in fiscal year 2024 there were over 2.9 million border encounters nationwide, last year there was a total of 691,906 encounters. If the pattern shaping up over the past several months continues until September, this year will see far fewer. After all, the number of border encounters from October through March was 531,301 in fiscal year 2025 but only 182,585 during the same stretch this fiscal year.
More important than the decline in border apprehensions is the total drop in releases. On Thursday, the Department of Homeland Security announced U.S. Border Patrol's 11th consecutive month of zero releases at the southern border.
The Trump administration has, apparently, also succeeded in greatly reducing the number of legal migrants entering the nation.
David Bier, the director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, endeavored in a new report to take the wind out of President Donald Trump's sails on the issue of immigration control, not only claiming that Trump's success in curbing illegal alien entries was a gift from the previous administration, but complaining that Trump has significantly reduced legal migration.
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While framing the reductions in legal immigration in negative terms, Bier — a libertarian who previously attempted to blame Trump for the immigration crisis and aided the effort to thwart the president's executive order requiring Border Patrol to immediately send any border crosser packing — has unwittingly provided strong indications that the president has delivered a result that 55% of Americans said they wanted the year he was re-elected.
According to the Cato Institute report, the number of monthly southwest border legal entries by asylum seekers dropped 99.9% from December 2024 to February 2025, which Bier credited to the Trump administration's elimination of the CBP One scheduling app and restrictions on asylum.
The leading countries of origin for refugees admitted in the final year of the Biden administration were Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Syria, and Venezuela.
The Trump administration also reduced the number of refugees admitted into the country. There were, for instance, 96,635 admissions from Feb. 2024 to Jan. 2025, but only 2,157 admissions from Feb. 2025 to Jan. 2026. The president has capped admissions in fiscal year 2026 at 7,500 refugees.
Bier's frustration with what he has dubbed the "most anti-legal immigrant administration in American history" wasn't limited to the curbs on asylum seekers and refugees.
In light of the administration's denial of immigrant visas and visa issuances to foreigners from scores of countries and the State Department's suspension of the Diversity Visa lottery, Bier projected — absent the relevant data on visa issuances since September 2025 — that immigrant visas for legal permanent residents have fallen by roughly half.
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"These bans affected half of all legal immigrants coming from abroad, including half of all spouses and minor children of U.S. citizens, based on 2024 immigrant visa processing," Bier wrote. "However, it’s possible some of this flow could be replaced with immigrants from other countries, but that did not happen when President Trump enacted a narrower ban on certain categories of immigrants from 19 countries in June."
In addition to sparing the taxpayer from shouldering the cost of more welfare dependents and American labor from foreign competition, Bier faulted the administration for bringing down the number of international student visas.
A Pew Research Center poll conducted in September revealed sizable American support for restricting the number of foreign college students from various countries, particularly the countries that have historically sent the most students to U.S. universities.
Fifty percent of respondents said they supported restricting the number of Chinese students; 44%, Indian students; 42%, Nigerian students; 41%, South Korean students; and 34%, Canadian students.
Comparing issuances in summer 2024 versus in summer 2025 — the "peak months when students typically get visas" — Bier concluded that student visas had fallen by 40%. He projected that the number of issuances in 2026 will be a tiny fraction of 2025's anticipated total of international student visas.
Bier also had some good news for critics of the much-abused H-1B visa program, which enables U.S.-based employers to temporarily hire foreign workers into specialized positions that American citizens supposedly can't do.
The libertarian estimated that in the wake of Trump's September executive order adding a $100,000 fee to H-1B visa applications, H-1B visa issuances had likely dropped "by a quarter."
After trying sympathy — "these cuts to legal immigration are harming U.S. citizens seeking to reunite with their spouses, fiancés, children, and other relatives" — Bier's libertarian reflexes kicked in, such that he emphasized that "they are also undermining U.S. prosperity and increasing the U.S. deficit."
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Ed Crane Was Right About Free Speech And The Iraq War Years Before The Country Caught Up
Ed Crane had a gift for identifying moments when liberty required an unpopular defense — and history has a way of catching up to him.Digital tyrants want your face, your ID … and your freedom
Thomas Sowell’s warning fits the digital age with brutal precision: There are no solutions, only trade-offs. When governments regulate technology, they seize your privacy first. Every “safety” mandate becomes an excuse to collect more personal data, and the result is always the same. Bureaucrats claim to protect you while making you more vulnerable.
Age-verification laws illustrate this perfectly. Discord’s recent breach — more than 70,000 stolen government ID photos taken from a third-party vendor — shows how quickly privacy collapses once platforms are forced to gather sensitive data.
Millions of citizens should not be forced to trade away privacy because policymakers refuse to acknowledge the risks.
To comply with the U.K.’s new Online Safety Act, Discord began collecting users’ documentation. That data became a target, and once breached, attackers reportedly demanded a multimillion-dollar ransom and threatened to publish the stolen IDs. Discord failed to monitor its vendor’s security practices, and thousands paid the price.
Age-verification mandates require digital platforms to confirm a user’s age before granting access to specific content or services. That means uploading government IDs or submitting to facial scans. The stated goal is child safety. The actual effect is compulsory data surrender. These laws normalize the idea that governments can force citizens to hand over sensitive information just to use the internet.
Centralized data collection creates a jackpot for cybercriminals. As the Discord breach proves, one compromise exposes thousands — or millions — of users. Criminals can sell this information, reuse it for identity theft, or weaponize it for blackmail. The problem isn’t a one-off failure. It is structural. Age verification mandates require platforms to create consolidated databases of personally identifying information, which become single points of catastrophic failure.
The libertarian Cato Institute captures the problem: “Requiring age verification creates a trove of attractive data for hackers that could put broader information about users, particularly young users, at risk.”
Governments may insist that the Discord breach was an outlier. It wasn’t. Breaches of sensitive information are predictable in systems designed to aggregate it. Even if the motives behind the U.K.’s age-verification regime were noble, undermining privacy to advance those aims is a trade-off free societies should reject. That is why the Online Safety Act triggered an outcry far beyond the U.K.
And, as usual, legislative mandates fail to achieve their stated goals. Days after the OSA took effect, VPN downloads surged as users — including children — bypassed verification systems. Laura Tyrylyte, Nord Security’s head of public relations, told Wired that “whenever a government announces an increase in surveillance, internet restrictions, or other types of constraints, people turn to privacy tools.” Predictably, age-verification laws encourage evasion instead of compliance.
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The pattern is simple: Age-verification laws degrade privacy, heighten the risk of identity theft, and fail to keep minors off restricted platforms. They make the internet less safe for everyone.
Meanwhile, policymakers remain determined to spread these mandates in the name of protecting children. The U.K. pioneered the model. Many other governments followed. Twenty-five U.S. states have adopted similar laws. The list grows each month.
But governments cannot treat data breaches as acceptable collateral damage. Millions of citizens should not be forced to trade away privacy because policymakers refuse to acknowledge the risks. The result of this approach will be more surveillance, more breaches, more stolen personal data, and a steady erosion of civil liberties.
Privacy is the backbone of liberty in a digital world. Thomas Jefferson’s warning deserves repetition: “The natural progress of things is for government to gain ground and for liberty to yield.”
Age-verification mandates accelerate that progress — and citizens pay the price.
How a ‘C’ paper at Yale became a $54 billion global empire
The “C” grade FedEx founder Fred Smith received from a Yale professor on a paper outlining his vision for an overnight delivery service is much less remarkable than is often assumed. Naturally, Smith got a C. Rest assured that most investors gave him an F, assuming they bothered to hear Smith’s pitch in the first place.
Evidence supporting the above claim can be found in the billions Smith left behind, along with the market cap ($54 billion) of FedEx itself. Smith’s wealth and FedEx’s valuation are evidence of Smith’s entrepreneurial genius — his ability to see what others couldn’t, to act decisively, and to execute brilliantly on a vision that defied conventional wisdom.
At least rhetorically, Donald Trump sees interconnectivity as impoverishing. That’s too bad.
Stop and contemplate the miraculous nature of Smith’s innovation. No doubt many wished they could have next-day or two-day delivery. But as Smith’s billions yet again indicate, his greatest insight was in figuring out how to solve a problem that appeared insolvable: how to profitably move documents around the U.S. and around the world overnight. Investors didn’t believe it could be done, which is why opposite-thinking, passionate people like Smith are so crucial to progress.
Which brings us to economist Joseph Schumpeter’s notion of “creative destruction.” It was his way of saying that great business ideas are routinely replaced by even better ones. Stasis is death in business.
Adapt or die
Smith knew this well. Miraculous as overnight delivery was, the proliferation of fax machines in the 1970s and '80s could have been an existential threat to FedEx. Same with email, PDF attachments, hyperlinks, and eventually DocuSign in the 1990s and beyond.
The easy move would have been to sell or shut down what technology was rapidly rendering dated — but that wasn’t Smith. A free thinker to the core, according to people like Cato Institute co-founder Ed Crane (Smith served on Cato’s board), who knew him well, Smith no doubt grasped that a world increasingly connected by split-second technology would be a prosperous one. And prosperous people don’t just want market goods — they want them quickly.
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While many entrepreneurs might have sold in the face of a technological onslaught, Smith kept on building. He pivoted his business to become more valuable — ironically, the more free-market forces rendered FedEx’s initial purpose dated and obsolete. Documents were to FedEx what books were to Amazon: just the test case for a business concept that would have even greater purpose the more the world thrived based on the connectivity that had, in so many ways, vitiated FedEx’s original business.
Smith’s lesson for Trump
The free, rapid movement of people and communications was only existential for Smith and FedEx insofar as he was unwilling to pivot. In other words, the free trade that Smith venerated didn’t victimize him or, for that matter, any entrepreneur capable of seeing that prosperity born out of open trade frequently creates even better lines for businesses to expand into. That’s why FedEx didn’t die long ago. Smith was too smart — not just for Schumpeter, but also for President Donald Trump.
At least rhetorically, Trump sees interconnectivity as impoverishing. That’s too bad. As Smith’s towering achievements indicate, the only true barriers to prosperity are those that separate producers from one another.
It’s a long way of saying Trump could learn from Smith’s constant evasion of creative destruction. The latter isn’t just an understatement — it’s also urgent.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearMarkets and made available via RealClearWire.
If Only Ukraine-Loving Senate Republicans Put Americans First For Once
While Senate Republicans rush to punish Putin, they dither on cutting taxes, shrinking government, and securing the border.Expert Says Congressional Republicans’ Plan To Curb CISA’s Criminal Censorship Practices Is Ineffective And ‘Sloppy’
An appropriations bill passed by the House and awaiting approval in the Senate will supposedly inhibit the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) from engaging in censorship, but a homeland security expert is not convinced. CISA, a component of the Department of Homeland Security, is described as the “nerve center” of federal government censorship. It is responsible for […]Today's top stories
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