By Chris Powell
Rage and indignation again are sweeping the state Capitol and the People’s Republic of New Haven, this time because the city’s “hometown airline,” Avelo, which has revived Tweed New Haven Airport, has contracted with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to fly illegal immigrants out of the country from Arizona.
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Mayor Justin Elicker calls this “antithetical to New Haven’s values.”
State Attorney General William Tong bellows that Avelo will “profit from and facilitate President Trump’s inhumane and unlawful atrocities.”
Leading Democratic state legislators are proposing legislation to prohibit state support for Avelo if it assists federal immigration authorities.
What exactly are New Haven’s values and state government’s values here?
Only nullification, insurrection, and secession.
Since 2007 New Haven has been issuing city identification cards to illegal immigrants to facilitate their lawbreaking. First the city and then state government forbade police officers from assisting federal immigration agents in most respects.
As for the “atrocities” Tong attributes to Trump, while some deportations are flawed, the federal government always has been empowered to deport people whose presence in the country is illegal. Few deportations are atrocities, unless one believes that open borders are a moral imperative.
That’s what Mayor Elicker, Attorney General Tong, Governor Lamont — all Democrats — and Democratic legislative leaders are saying. They maintain that anyone who enters the country illegally and makes his way to Connecticut should be exempt from immigration law, and if the country doesn’t revert to open borders, Connecticut will no longer be part of the United States.
If, as the Democrats maintain, the federal government is now so contaminated by its renewed enforcement of immigration law, will state government and city government in New Haven start refusing the many millions of dollars of federal financial aid they still receive?
Do the Democrats really think the state has the right to decide which federal laws it will obey and the right to determine the terms on which the state remains in the United States? Or were those issues settled to the contrary at Appomattox in 1865 and again at Little Rock in 1957?
The concern of Connecticut’s nullifiers for people whose presence in the country is illegal distracts from the state’s longstanding neglect of its own residents and especially the children in its cities. Most are fatherless, a third or more are chronically absent from school, their academic performance is horrible, and few of those who graduate from high school have more than a middle-school education.
The Democrats blame these failures on state government for not spending enough money, as if money equals education, even as they clamor for government to spend more money to support people living in the state illegally.
The ironies and hypocrisies are manifest but Connecticut’s news organizations don’t publicize them lest political correctness be disturbed and state residents get the idea that they should rejoin the United States.
BLAME, SHAME, AND QUESTIONS: Newborns have been abandoned since the time of Moses and probably before, but 25 years ago this month Connecticut undertook to minimize the damage. The state enacted its “safe havens” law, requiring hospitals with emergency rooms to receive newborns from mothers unconditionally and without interrogation.
Last week the law was celebrated at the state Capitol by the state Department of Children and Families and current and former legislators. The department said the law has been used 57 times, twice last year, so it probably has saved many babies and the department wants to keep publicizing it. The department said the law allows troubled new mothers to seek help “without any stigma attached — no blame, no shame, and no questions asked.”
Of course such a stance is necessary to protect newborns at risk of being abandoned, but social disintegration is exploding — neglectful parenting, much of it encouraged by government policy; stupid life decisions by young women; and men betraying and abandoning the women they have exploited and impregnated. There are actually plenty of blame and shame, and many questions to be asked, but no one in authority asks them.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
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Chris Powell column 