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The man who transformed El Salvador from one of the most dangerous countries in the world to one of the safest, President Nayib Bukele, is despised by liberals.
When he won reelection in a landslide, liberal media outlets ran headlines stating that democracy had ended in El Salvador and that the country had become a one-party state. However, El Salvador is not Cuba.
Bukele did not eradicate opposition parties, nor did he imprison them or seize control of the press. Instead, he delivered on his promises. He made the country safe by locking up criminals.
President Bukele claimed that his country went 365 days without a murder. And while the exact number has been called into question, it is an indisputable fact that the country now has the lowest murder rate it has seen in 30 years, plummeting by 70%, and now stands at only 2.4 per 100,000 in 2023, making it the second lowest in the Americas, just behind Canada.
In 2022, after a gang war resulted in the deaths of 87 people over a period of just three days, Bukele took action against crime. He constructed the country’s largest prison, the Terrorism Confinement Center (Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo or CECOT), with a capacity for 40,000 gang members. And he began filling it.
Out of gratitude for restoring peace in the country, voters reelected him with 85% of the vote. Human rights groups, who live in safe, wealthy Western nations, have criticized Bukele for violations of the rights of suspects.
But the logic is flawless. Only gang members have gang tattoos. If anyone else gets a gang tattoo, they will be killed by the gang. The same is true for tattoo artists.
They would be killed for giving gang tattoos to non-gang members. Additionally, part of the initiation to joining a gang is to commit a serious crime, often murder. Once they become a member, their full-time job is to commit crimes. So, logically, anyone with a gang tattoo is a gang member and has committed crimes.
In the U.S., it is not a crime to be affiliated with an organization, even a criminal one. To secure a conviction, there would need to be proof that the person committed a specific crime.
However, that system, while acceptable for a high-trust society, was being exploited in El Salvador, where repeat offenders and murderers were being set free by crooked judges and jailers.
So, Bukele decided to let logic prevail, arrest the gang members, and put them in prison. He was more concerned about the rights of street vendors, business owners, school children, working people, and ordinary citizens than he was about the rights of violent criminals.
The state of emergency he declared in 2022, and has renewed several times since, suspends the constitutional rights of the gang members and bypasses the corrupt courts and justice system, which had allowed the criminals to reign for decades. Since then, 75,000 gang members have been arrested, and 7,000 have been released.
According to reported data from human rights groups, since 2022, there have been 78,000 arbitrary detentions. This is likely because they consider nearly all of the arrests to be arbitrary detentions.
The rights groups are also upset that “approximately 102,000 people are now deprived of their freedom in the country,” disregarding the fact that these people are criminals.
Additionally, they are upset that the prisons are overcrowded by 148%, which is absolutely true. The prisons are not pleasant, and a sane person would avoid going there by not committing crimes.
They also lost sleep over 235 deaths in state custody. There is no mention of how many of these deaths represented prisoners being killed by other prisoners, nor have they stopped to consider that five times that number of innocent people would have died during the same time period if these gang members were not in prison.
Rights groups have claimed that Bukele’s New Ideas party winning 58 of 60 seats in the country’s legislature has turned the country into a one-party state, with a “dangerous” concentration of power.
They are missing the point that the country had a fair election and the people were free to vote for the horrible system they had before, or law and order, which is now making their lives livable again. And they chose the latter.
According to Gabriela Santos, director of the Human Rights Institute at the University of Central America (IDHUCA), “Bukele’s popularity underlines how some Central American countries have struggled to launch sustainable democratic models.”
Again, there appears to be no flaw in El Salvador’s democracy. The critics just do not like the way the vote turned out. Santos went on to say that countries never recovered their democratic principles “in the aftermath of civil conflicts between left-wing guerrillas and U.S.-backed right-wing authoritarian regimes.”
There is no indication that the people voting for Bukele had any connection to the US or to right-wing regimes.
Liberals are claiming that there is a frightening move toward fascism in Latin America because 2 of 32 countries now have a president who is not a socialist. The other bright spot is President Javier Milei in Argentina, whom the liberals also hate.
He is cutting the government down to size, waging a war on debt and waste. He told school children that abortion is murder. He is pro-gun and is considering deploying the military to take on the gangs.
The shocking lesson we can all learn from El Salvador is that if you arrest all of the bad guys and keep them in jail, and if those who remain free are made to believe that crime has consequences and jails are horrible places, the streets become safer, and people can live their lives.
The other takeaway here is that if a president is tough on crime and wants to cut government spending and improve the lives of citizens, the liberals attack him.
It is also incredibly condescending that liberals in Europe or the US or elsewhere believe that 85% of Salvadorians do not know what is best for their country and voted for the wrong person.
The post 365 Days Without a Murder: Why Liberals Hate El Salvador’s President appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
The California economy should serve as a cautionary tale for the rest of the nation, showcasing the negative impact of illegal immigration combined with liberal social welfare programs that discourage citizens from working.
The ‘Californication’ of the United States would exacerbate illegal immigration, depress market-driven labor rates, expand welfare rolls, significantly raise taxes on those employed, and prompt the government to address the diminished standard of living by imposing an exorbitant minimum wage.
Increasing the labor pool through illegal immigration drives down wages. The most basic law of economics, supply and demand, states that when supply increases and demand remains the same, price goes down.
You need water to live, but water is cheap because there is a large supply. Gold and diamonds are less of a necessity for maintaining life, but they are expensive because there is a large demand and limited supply. If tomorrow a new goldmine was discovered which quadrupled the supply of gold, the price of gold would go down.
Illegal immigrants increase the supply of workers, which brings down the price of labor, i.e., the wage. And although it is true that illegal immigrants are concentrated in certain industries, the decline in wages affects all industries.
The industries with the highest percentage of illegal immigrants are construction, cleaning, maintenance, food service, garment manufacturing, and agricultural occupations. The Americans who were displaced from those industries went to work in other industries, increasing the quantity of labor and driving down wages.
Using California as an example of what some people want to do to the entire country: illegal immigrants comprise 9% of the population. The market wage for workers was low because of the large pool of immigrants.
The Democratic legislation addressed this issue by imposing a draconian minimum wage of $16 an hour for all workers and $20 for those working in fast food.
The state also has liberal unemployment and welfare rules. As market wages drop and unemployment or welfare benefits increase, people are disincentivized to continue working.
In many Democrat-led states, workers can earn more on benefits than they can working. And a minimum wage of $20 an hour will not fix this problem. Jobs like landscaping and construction used to pay more than $20 an hour.
And jobs in maintenance and janitorial services, while not the highest paid, used to have job security and benefits when they were done on the books, by legal workers.
The Americans who lost those career jobs to illegals cannot make up the lost income by flipping burgers. Removing the illegal immigrants from the labor force will cause the natural rate of wages in landscaping, construction, and maintenance to increase, motivating people to go back to work.
Not surprisingly, as a result of its socialist policies, California has the highest poverty rate in the country when the cost of living is considered (the supplemental poverty measure).
The high taxes, high minimum wage, and lack of law enforcement have caused a steady exodus of companies, resulting in rising unemployment. However, the minimum wage only applies to legal workers, not illegals, so many of the unemployed citizens were replaced by illegal immigrants.
And now, the taxpayers are paying for it in the form of unemployment or welfare benefits. However, the illegals do not pay taxes. So, the tax burden on each legal worker is increasing, which then disincentivizes people from working. And the circle goes on and on, spiraling steadily downward.
At the national level, Democrats in favor of illegal immigration claim that low unemployment rates in the US are proof that “we need illegal immigrants” to fill those jobs. However, this claim ignores the labor force participation rate, which took a nosedive in 2020 and has never returned to pre-pandemic levels.
The labor force participation rate refers to the percentage of the working-age population (usually defined as individuals aged 16 and older) who are either employed or actively seeking employment.
People who are on unemployment are still counted as being part of the labor force because they are allegedly looking for a job. Only those who give up or go on permanent welfare or benefits are no longer counted.
There are two important points here. By liberalizing unemployment benefits, increasing the amount and the duration of the payments, the Biden Administration gets to count these people as part of the labor force.
And yet, the labor force participation rate is declining. This brings us to the second point. The federal government spent $1.3 trillion on welfare programs in 2023. If social benefits were not plentiful, more people would remain in the workforce.
In California, the labor force participation rate has been trending steadily downward since 1989. Currently, only 62% of legal adults are part of California’s labor force. Meanwhile, California has one of the highest incidences of tax in the country.
It also has 28% of the total homeless population of the United States, with the number having increased by 40% over the past 5 years. In short, California is a mess of outcomes that could not happen in a free-market economy that enforced immigration laws and was tough on crime.
According to Pew Research, 87% of Democrat voters agree that illegal immigrants only do jobs Americans won’t do. This notion is completely false. The reality is, there is no job Americans won’t do if they are paid for it.
Removing the illegals and canceling the benefits programs will bring about an equilibrium between wages and labor force participation. Taxes could be cut, and the minimum wage for unskilled work could go back to a reasonable market rate.
People would be incentivized to work and to better themselves, while the burger-flipping jobs would revert to the high school and college students who previously held them.
The post Illegal Immigrants Do Jobs Americans Collecting Benefits Won’t Do appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
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