Much of the mainstream news this week has been, in my opinion, partisan or devoted to less-than-significant matters. Does it really matter if the Trump-appointed board that saved the Kennedy Center from going to wrack and ruin has added his name to the building? Were you really surprised that Bill Clinton, not Trump, was pictured in the released Epstein files cavorting with women whose faces were blacked out because they were either minors or victims? Were you so daft that you thought Biden, who had these files, was protecting his arch-enemy Trump from exposure?

On the internet, the focus was on the shootings at Brown University and Brookline and the manifest incompetence of the Providence police force and the grossly bloated and overcompensated Brown administration. A Reddit poster broke the case, having observed suspicious behavior by the perpetrator. The poster was a homeless Brown grad living in the basement of the engineering building who stands to receive a $50,000 reward for breaking the case. The question remains, if the police had been competent and given consideration to the first report, would the shooter, who finally committed suicide, have been free to murder a second time? The other hot topic was how Ben Shapiro, speaking at a major TPUSA event, eviscerated the grifting Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens. It remains to be seen how J.D. Vance extricates himself from Tucker’s embrace, essential, in my view, if he runs for the presidency.

I think the important and underreported stories of the week, are different -- the growing fractures in the European Union and the Administration’s lowering the boom on richly rewarded migration sponsors.

Immigration Sponsor Boondoggle

It’s no secret that Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) have been cleaning up on bringing migrants into the country and placing them on a variety of welfare plans to the detriment of taxpayers and the communities which are forced to host them. Respecting the unaccompanied children program: 

The Free Press examined three of the most prominent NGOs that have benefited: Global Refuge, Southwest Key Programs, and Endeavors, Inc. These organizations have seen their combined revenue grow from $597 million in 2019 to an astonishing $2 billion by 2022, the last year for which federal disclosure documents are available. And the CEOs of all three nonprofits reap more than $500,000 each in annual compensation, with one of them -- the chief executive of Southwest Key -- making more than $1 million.

The picture is the same for adult migrants. Via the departments of Homeland Security and HHS, these NGOs have raked in billions of dollars under the prior administrations.

Compensation packages for executives of these organizations tend to be lavish. The latest account I can find, i.e., for Catholic Charities, reports that the CEO receives almost $1 million per annum. Doubtless there are other financial perks.

That’s about to come to an end. The Department of Justice reversed a Clinton era interpretation of welfare laws and is seeking recompense from these sponsors for welfare and other tax-funded benefits, Deputy Secretary of HHS Jim O’Neill, relying on this reinterpretation of the regulations, demanded repayment from these sponsors. 

“Am I,” Cain once innocently asked, “my brother’s keeper?” Until very recently, the answer was ‘no’ for the highly compensated commercial sponsors of foreign aliens resettled here under Biden’s various dumb plans. That may have changed yesterday. An article from the New American (selected because corporate media is ignoring the story) was headlined, “HHS to Immigrant Sponsors: Pay What You Owe for Immigrants Who Use Medicaid or Face Collection.”

Under various laws and programs, foreign citizens can ‘permanently reside’ in the U.S. as non-citizens. It’s not U.S. citizenship, but it’s not not citizenship, either. Biden used one of these programs, for example, to submerge midwestern towns with Haitians who can’t drive. (Ditto for Somalis and many other failed-state refugees.) The rules are complex and arcane, which is why Biden also paid lawyers to help the migrants.

One of the rules requires each permanent resident to have a sponsor, an individual who demonstrates sufficient assets and income to support the person if they ever become a financial burden on the state.

There’s even a sponsor form, the I-864, which includes a contract. The contract puts the sponsor on the hook for any welfare given to the immigrant by any local, state, or Federal agency. [snip]

Right about now, you’re probably thinking this sounds great, and wondering why you never heard of it before. The reason is simple. The Democrats passed this law to ‘prove’ immigrants wouldn’t be a burden, and then promptly broomed it via their favorite tactic: selective non-enforcement. Two tiers of justice are better than one!

So far as I can tell from court records, the government has never before sued a sponsor. After all, the contract only says the agency “may ask for reimbursement.” May. Not “must.”

One imagines the interview. The sponsor, ready to sign, stumbles over the liability paragraph. He holds the pen, blinking, unsure, and looks up querulously at the free immigrant attorney. “Does this mean…” they begin to ask. They needn’t finish the sentence. The lawyer waves her cigarette airily and says, “don’t worry about that section. They never do anything about that.”

Well, yesterday, HHS Deputy Secretary Jim O’Neill -- the same “men are men” official from yesterday’s C&C post-- announced what may be the first demand letters sent since the law originally passed in 1996 under Bill Clinton. According to his tweets, Mr. O’Neill has begun dunning some sponsors for the cost of Medicaid used by their sponsored immigrants[/quote]

The new definition of “Federal means-tested public benefit” in the sponsor form makes each sponsor liable for “Any federal benefit for which the eligibility of an individual, household or family eligibility unit for benefits, or the amount of such benefits, or both are determined on the basis of the income, resources, or financial need of the individual, household, or unit regardless of the funding sources for that public benefit.”

It will be something to see the NGO sponsors being forced to cough up what they owe taxpayers for bringing in as sponsors millions of people who cannot and did not support themselves.

Fissures in the European Union

The leaders of the EU tried to sequester frozen Russian funds to support Ukraine. That move failed. The U.S. is no longer funding Ukrainian kleptocrats in a war Ukraine cannot possibly win, and now the Europeans can prolong the war only by using their own money. Zelensky should be worried, as Wolfgang Munchau notes.

“There is a lot of sugar-coating going on this morning. The sequestration deal is truly dead. The EU will pay the €90bn for Ukraine out of its own pockets. Now that it is the EU’s own money at stake, diplomacy is already starting to shift. Macron said last night EU should reconnect with Putin. The war-mongering in the EU was to a large extent a money illusion -- other people paying for it. Now that the EU is having to put its own money where its mouth is, expect to hear a lot more people calling for peace.”

Philip Pilkington argues the EU itself may collapse as a result of its Ukrainian adventure: 

“EU is now fully funding Ukraine. Without this funding the hryvnia would collapse and Ukraine would descend into hyperinflation. The EU is stuck providing funding now. Either they fund it forever or at some point they allow the collapse. This might end up collapsing the EU.”

Hungary’s Victor Orban played a key role in the anti-sequestration battle and refused to enter into a loan agreement with Ukraine. 

“We have endured a long and challenging night. We managed to avert the immediate risk of war. We did not allow Europe to issue a declaration of war on Russia by using Russian assets. This plan would have dragged Europe into war and imposed a financial burden of 1000 billion HUF on Hungary. We succeeded in protecting Hungarian families from this. At the same time, 24 member states decided to grant a war loan to Ukraine for the next two years. If Ukraine is unable to repay the loan, those European countries will have to cover the repayment. Thankfully, the V3 cooperation is active once again: Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic have decided not to get on that train. By doing so, we spared our children and grandchildren from the burden of this massive €90 billion loan. Hungary’s share of the war loan would have been more than 400 billion HUF. The bad news is that war preparations are clearly continuing in Brussels. Hungary remains the voice of peace in Europe and will not let Hungarian taxpayers’ money be used to finance Ukraine. Only a government of patriots can guarantee peace and ensure that Hungarian funds are not sent to Ukraine. If there were a Brusselian government in Hungary, they'd push Hungary into war and spend every last dime on supporting Ukraine. We cannot and will not allow this to happen!”

At the same time, Europeans are rebelling against the EU commission’s idiotic economy-threatening and media control diktats. Vilnius, Lithuania was the site of large protests against the pro-EU government’s effort to control public media by imposing changes to that nation’s broadcasting law. In France, farmers, firefighters, and taxi drivers are protesting the EU’s agriculture constraints. In Belgium, farmers dumped tons of potatoes outside EU headquarters.

German sentiment for the EU’s open borders policy has dramatically shifted.

 GERMANY’S “WELCOME CULTURE” COLLAPSES: MAJORITY NOW WANT IMMIGRATION HALTED & DEPORTATIONS RAMPED UP A new poll just dropped, and it’s a political earthquake: a majority of Germans now support an immigration moratorium and mass deportations. The poll shows that 81% of Germans state that illegal immigration was “far too high” or “rather too high” over the last 10 years, and only 5% view the levels as appropriate. Another 75% say illegal migration has been bad for Germany. Yes, in Germany… the same country that once opened its doors to over a million refugees in 2015, which was promoted by Angela Merkel, her CDU, and the left. However, after years of failed integration, rising crime headlines, housing shortages, and mounting public frustration, the mood has flipped hard. Nowadays, 53% of Germans favor a total moratorium on all new immigration and immigration overall, as well as the return of a large number of migrants to their homelands, otherwise known by many on the right as “remigration” or mass deportation. It’s official… the once-celebrated “welcome culture” has turned into: enough is enough. Berlin’s political class can’t keep ignoring this shift, because the public clearly isn’t. Source: @zerohedge, Remix News, YouGov

Traditional Christmas and New Year’s celebrations have been cancelled or scaled back for fear of violence in Western Europe, violence directly attributable to migrants brought in under the EU’s open borders laws.

There’s some delusionary talk, especially in the UK, about reinstituting conscription to prepare for war. I can’t imagine young Brits would go along with this. You can’t have a two-tier judicial system that treats patriots like criminals and expect them to fight to maintain allegiance to the very government that persecutes them for nationalism. If they did, however, while they were fighting on some far-away front, the rapacious, murderous thugs allowed into the UK by open border policies would be raping and murdering their loved ones remaining at home. 

Upcoming News

The cost of the stolen funds in Minnesota is now estimated at $9 billion dollars and Tim Walz is being held to account for this theft on his watch. (Similar Somalian migrant fraud is being uncovered in Maine.) Of course, there’s more than a slim possibility that officials overlooked this overt, substantial theft, in exchange for votes, often cast just as fraudulently. Speaking of vote fraud, the vote cheating in 2020 is tardily being officially examined. Fulton County, Georgia officials admit that over 315,000 illegal votes were counted in a state where Biden “won” by less than 12,000. I think in coming months congressional investigators and DoJ teams will be documenting how millions of illegal votes got counted in 2020 -- something that should provide impetus for moves to tighten sloppy election rules and oversight. Along with the confected “pandemic” and arguments for mail-in ballots purportedly to protect lives during it, these departures from sound practice by Democrats made the 2020 election an illegal farce, particularly in the swing states.