A Complexity of Complexes… Simplified

There is the military-industrial complex.  There is the intelligence-industrial complex.  There is the censorship-industrial complex.  There is the research-industrial complex.  There is the climate-industrial complex.  There is the homeless-industrial complex.

And, as the Globe pointed out last week, there is the illegal immigrant-industrial complex.

But the complexes – all of them – can be easily simplified:  they are each churning masses of people and groups and foundations and companies that stand between your tax money and accomplishing a public goal.

And they stand in that in-between position for another simple reason – to get as much of that money as possible.

The goal becomes secondary – feeding the complex is the overriding imperative of the complex.  From the defense budget and the brass’s tendency to vastly overspend buying things from companies they will soon work for to the inexplicably and offensively expensive homeless housing units being built in LA and around the state ($850,000 each for the equivalent of an extended stay hotel room,) to the im-or-explicit threats held over research scientists who may want to actually tell the truth (see Fauci,) each member of the complex gleefully dances the gargantuan money vortex.

And they are not doing it for you.

Instead of solving problems and providing services, the complexes interfere with progress, retard development, build empires, and engage in propaganda only to create the detrimentative  beholdences that clot the national circulatory system.

But what kind of specific groups make up the blobs and globs of greed and incompetence?

In the case of the illegal immigrant industrial complex (IIIC, and it should be pronounced “ick,”) a number of its hydra snakes went to the public a week or so ago to whip up support to try to block the immigration reform/send money to Ukraine bill in the Senate.

“Trading the dignity and safety of asylum seekers in exchange for one-time foreign aid would be absolutely disastrous. The rumored policy changes would annihilate asylum protections and have a devastating impact on people seeking safety and refuge,” said Lindsay Toczylowski, co-founder and executive director of Immigrant Defenders Law Center (ImmDef) about the bill.

They got their wish, just not for their preferred reasons.  

So who got their wish, no matter how backhanded?  Let’s look at a few of the groups active in the struggle…

The Justice Action Center (JAC) in Los Angeles had a budget in 2022 of about $1.4 million, with about 80% of that going for total employee compensation (the chief and founder took in a bit less than $300,000.)

The JAC is relatively unique in that they are working to create “Immigrant Justice Through Litigation and Storytelling.” https://justiceactioncenter.org/# 

This does raise the question of how the Three Little Pigs could have gotten from the Big Bad Wolf (I think they could have sued the fur off of him,) but that is more of a side issue.

While the premise sounds made up out of whole cloth after a few bong hits just to raise money, it may not be:  Replace “storytelling” with “controlling the narrative” and the point becomes crystal clear.

This is how the JAC explains it in the federal tax filing (which, by the way, did not include a specific donor list.)  The ALL CAPS are from the form:

IMPACT LITIGATION: JUSTICE ACTION CENTER (JAC) USES LITIGATION AND STORYTELLING TO ADVOCATE FOR UNSEEN AND OVERLOOKED ISSUES FACED BY IMMIGRANTS. WE ENSURE THE RICHNESS AND DIVERSITY OF THE IMMIGRANT EXPERIENCE IS HEARD BOTH INSIDE AND OUTSIDE THE COURTROOM. IMPACT LITIGATION IS AN IMPORTANT TOOL TO ADVANCE THE RIGHTS OF IMMIGRANTS.

STORYTELLING: JAC’S MODEL DEPENDS UPON PLACING EQUAL EMPHASIS ON STORYTELLING AND LITIGATION. WE RECOGNIZE THAT WINNING A LAWSUIT ALONE WILL NOT LEAD TO THE SYSTEMIC CHANGE WE SEEK. WE STRIVE TO BUILD A NEW FRAMEWORK THAT USES LITIGATION AND NARRATIVE WORK TO TANGIBLY IMPROVE IMMIGRANTS’ LIVES. JAC PRODUCES ORIGINAL COMMUNICATIONS AND DIGITAL CONTENT FOCUSED ON THE IMMIGRANT EXPERIENCE AND PERSPECTIVES. OUR STORYTELLING WORK IS DESIGNED TO STRIVE TO TANGIBLY IMPROVE IMMIGRANTS’ LIVES AND IS ROOTED IN THE NOTION THAT TRANSFORMATIVE CHANGE WILL ONLY OCCUR WHEN DOMINANT NARRATIVES ABOUT IMMIGRATION AND BELONGING SHIFT. THESE SHIFTS ARE PART OF A BROADER ECOSYSTEM OF WORK; JAC SEEKS TO PARTICIPATE IN THAT ECOSYSTEM BY USING THE MICROPHONE PROVIDED BY LITIGATION TO CENTER AND UPLIFT IMMIGRANT STORIES. MOREOVER, WE AIM TO DECODE THE LEGAL SYSTEM TO HELP DISMANTLE WHAT IS OFTEN A BARRIER TO ACTION AND ADVOCACY BY IMMIGRANTS AND ADVOCATES.

In other words, file lawsuits and scream at the media and look gooder amongst your fellow do-gooders.

In case you were wondering, the JAC’s vision is “a future where the freedom to move is respected, immigrant narratives are rooted in dignity and belonging, and people seeking safety can access protection through systems that value humanity over exclusion. To ensure an immigrant-inclusive world, this future must also embody intersectional justice, with racial, economic, gender, disability, and climate justice for all.”

Talk about kitchen sink wokeism.  

Oh, and they’re hiring.

As noted above, IMMDEF is another player in the illegal money game.  This $12 million per year outfit spends about 90% of its fund on payroll and related personnel expenses, mostly in the $100 to $150,000 range for leadership slots.

IMMDEF  not only handles legal matters but also focuses on “client wellness”:

“The (case management) team supports our clients with accessing mental health services, emergency housing, transportation, Medi-Cal, school enrollment, food, clothing, housing security, life skills, and works with our clients to create post-release plans.”

That’s just in case crossing the border somehow wiped those skills from their minds.

But do note the word “clients.” IMMDEF and their ilk see illegals as “clients” from the get-go.

You are a client, you are therefore dependent on other people, on a leftist political structure that generates tidy incomes for those involved.  The “how to vote” is implied.

Oh, and they’re hiring.

And if the circle needs widening to grab every stray dollar possible, the UC College of the Law, San Francisco (formerly Hastings until people alleged the namesake might have not been nice 150 years ago) has a – really – Gender and Refugee Studies Center that has decided to branch out into “climate displacement,” the Globe reported.

Because prior to the expansion of scope, the Center was only about “coordinated litigation, advocacy, and training… and is working to rebuild our asylum system and expand the United States’ promise of protection for those escaping persecution.”

While the current budget is unknown, the Center is supported through tax money. And UC Law is (broken record) hiring.

How gender and asylum fit together seems a bit fuzzy, though the Center started in 1999 after a professor helped a Togolese woman fleeing female genital cutting.  

Fair enough – actually congrats and a really good thing to do.

The Center continues to do similar work but, when it comes to the southern border, brings “cutting edge litigation to push the law forward, advocate for policies that recognize gender-based persecution as a basis for asylum, and provide legal support in thousands of individual gender-based asylum cases annually… Many marginalized people request asylum on the basis of persecution suffered on account of their membership in a particular social group, including women fleeing domestic violence, children targeted by gangs, LGBTQ+ people fleeing homophobic and transphobic violence, and others who have been historically excluded from protection.”

Again not inherently bad but the squishiness of the amalgamation would seem to invite, shall we say, improper manipulation.  Well, not to seem cynical, but it almost certainly really really really does happen, a lot.

As to the Center’s climate work, that’s a bit more clearly bonkers:

“According to the UN Refugee Agency, over 90 percent of the world’s refugees hail from the countries most vulnerable to climate devastation. Experts predict that the unsafe conditions forcing refugees to flee their homes will only deteriorate in the coming years. 

By 2050, it is estimated that more than 200 million people will be forcibly displaced by extreme weather and environmental disasters such as droughts, storms, earthquakes, and rises in sea level annually. More and more, this displacement is happening across international borders. Yet the United States currently has no formal protection mechanisms to offer permanent safe haven to those displaced by climate change.”

This fails to even consider the terrible curse of temporary seasonal displacement – clearly, if I had a house in Palm Springs and in Lake Tahoe I would be eligible to get the Center to sue someone to pay my to and from airfare every year.

Utter nonsense, of course, but very profitable nonsense.  It seems the Center realized in 2021 (hmm, I wonder why they ignored the weather until the start of the Biden admin?) that being able to put the word “climate” in funding requests would get them moved to the top of the pile.

And there is Welcome With Dignity, a form of umbrella group that includes dozens of sub IIIC members like JAC and IMMDEF and the somehow still not mocked into oblivion Southern Poverty Law Center.

WWD does not mess around.  The website is still demanding you call your senator to stop the aforementioned bill that would trade “away refugee protections. This tradeoff would destroy life-saving protections for people seeking safety and increase chaos at the U.S.-Mexico border, as well as expand fast-track deportations of immigrants in the U.S.

We need your help to urge lawmakers to reject bad-faith deals meant to make it impossible to seek safety in the U.S. and deport people back to danger.”

They even provide a handy-dandy script people can use when they call or email their elected officials.  Note to aspiring issue advocates: these “astroturf” campaigns never work and in fact lessen the impact of any particular viewpoint because the electeds figure them out and assume it’s all a put-up job.

And why is WWD so strident?  Because ‘Muricans are bad now and have always been bad:

“The #WelcomeWithDignity Campaign is committed to transforming the way the United States receives and protects people forced to flee their homes to ensure they are treated humanely and fairly. To build a more just and truly humanitarian system we must reject the xenophobia and racism that motivated the cruel and dangerous policies of the past.”

Not sure if they are hiring and their budget is not in the federal non-profit registry, but WWD appears to be a heavy player in the open borders world and is a clearinghouse for bad ideas from across the nation.

Originally, the idea was to do a number of different pieces on the agencies listed in the previous Globe article. But that turned out to be pointless to the point of irritating because if you read the websites they could all be cut/pasted from the same “Hi, ChatGPT – give me the most trite, the most woke talking points on the border” conversation and that would be even more tediously repetitive.

And, lastly, we come to Witness at the Border.  This seems like a relatively small group that tracks  immigration flights and shows up with signs.

‘Nuff said.