Drumpf Diary 1/28/17 - Immigration Notes, The United Nations of Drumpf, Gag Orders

The Pew Research Center shares 5 facts about undocumented immigration into the United States. In 2014, there were 11.1 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. 8 million of them were in the workforce, accounting for 5% of the total workforce. Both of those numbers represent essentially no change from 2009, so for 5+ years immigration into the U.S. has leveled off. Undocumented immigrants represent a disproportionate share of farming and construction work, 26% and 15% respectively. Mexicans make up most of all undocumented immigrants but their numbers have actually been in decline in the 2009-2014 period. About 2/3rds of undocumented immigrants have been here for 10 or more years.

Mother Jones's Kevin Drum argues that there is logic in congressional Democrats voting for Drumpf cabinet nominees. He states that it is customary that new presidents get to pick most of their cabinet and, more importantly, Democrats don't have the votes to block every nominee so they hope that in yielding on some nominees they might persuade a few moderate Republicans to vote against a few especially egregious nominees.

I'm not holding my breath for that strategy to work out. I see the logic, and I suppose united opposition won't be any more effective given the lack of votes.

Nikki Haley, former South Carolina governor and the new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, made her first appearance there with an air of... I dunno... talking like the U.S. somehow owns the U.N., which I guess is a sadly honest stance.

In the same story on Haley, Reuters reports:

According to a draft executive order published by The Daily Beast, Trump wants a committee - including his secretary of state, attorney general and director of national intelligence -to carry out a one-year review of U.S. funding to international organizations with the aim of almost halving voluntary funding.

A senior U.S. administration official said on Friday that no such executive order was "expected at this time."

The United States is the largest contributor to the United Nations, paying 22 percent of the $5.4 billion core U.N. budget and 28 percent of the $7.9 billion U.N. peacekeeping budget. These are assessed contributions - agreed by the U.N. General Assembly - and not voluntary payments.

U.N. agencies, such as the U.N. Development Programme, the children's agency UNICEF, the World Food Programme and the U.N. Population Fund, are funded voluntarily.

It sounds like the media firestorm over administration gag orders on federal agencies may have been an overreaction. The above story is written by a Republican. But she points out:

The New York Times interviewed three different longtime career employees who all seemed a bit mystified by the reporting. "I've lived through many transitions, and I don't think this is a story," said a senior EPA career official. "This is standard practice." In a similar piece, Science magazine interviewed an official at a U.S. Agricultural Research Service, who said the memo, the magazine wrote, was "a poorly-worded effort by career officials – not anyone appointed by Trump – to remind employees of a longstanding U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) policy on clearing statements that have policy relevance with senior officials before releasing them." He went on to say that they essentially used the same memo that was used when Tom Vilsack took over the agency in 2009.

In case you feel inclined to take anything written by a Republican with deep suspicion, she closes with, "There are more than enough real reasons to be concerned about what the new administration is doing."