MxM News

President Trump’s Department of Homeland Security is marking what officials are calling a landmark moment in U.S. immigration enforcement, announcing Wednesday that more than 2.5 million illegal aliens have now left the country since Trump returned to the Oval Office in January. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said the surge reflects a sweeping, sustained crackdown driven by Immigration and Customs Enforcement teams that — according to internal tallies — have already removed more than 605,000 illegal aliens, most of whom were facing criminal charges or carrying prior convictions. Nearly two million more have opted to self-deport, a wave Noem attributes to stepped-up enforcement and the administration’s aggressive public messaging. She again urged those still in the country illegally to use the government’s CBP Home app, which offers a free one-way flight and a $1,000 stipend to expedite departure.

Senior DHS officials say arrests have climbed as well, with almost 600,000 illegal aliens taken into custody since January 20. “Illegal aliens are hearing our message to leave now,” DHS official McLaughlin said this week. “They know if they don’t, we will find them, we will arrest them, and they will never return.”

The administration argues the impact is being felt far beyond immigration courts and detention facilities, pointing to the U.S. housing market as one of the clearest signs of change. For six straight months, DHS says not a single illegal alien has been released into the interior from the southern border — a dramatic shift after years of mass inflows under President Biden. That decline, they say, is finally filtering into rent and home-price data after years of punishing increases.

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner said Americans have now seen four consecutive months of rent decreases — the first sustained drop in years — as fewer illegal aliens compete for housing. Vice President JD Vance emphasized the connection even more bluntly: “The connection between illegal immigration and skyrocketing housing costs is as clear as day. We are proud to be moving in the right direction. Still so much to do.”

Research abroad and at home backs up the administration’s argument. Economists in Denmark released findings earlier this year showing that a one-percentage-point rise in local immigration over a five-year period drove private rental prices up roughly 6 percent and home prices up about 11 percent. The Center for Immigration Studies presented similar data to Congress last year, with researcher Steven Camarota testifying that a 5-percentage-point increase in a metro area’s recent-immigrant share was tied to a 12-percent rise in rent for U.S.-born households.

As DHS leaders frame it, Trump’s second-term enforcement machine is reshaping both border policy and household budgets — an approach they say is finally delivering relief to Americans who spent years squeezed by soaring housing costs and unchecked migration.

From Resource Works

By Stewart Muir

Even Bill Gates has shifted his stance, acknowledging that renewables alone can’t sustain a modern energy system — a reality still driving decisions in Canada.

You know the world has shifted when the New York Times, long a pulpit for hydrocarbon shame,  starts publishing passages like this:

“Changes in policy matter, but the shift is also guided by the practical lessons that companies, governments and societies have learned about the difficulties in shifting from a world that runs on fossil fuels to something else.”

For years, the Times and much of the English-language press clung to a comfortable catechism: 100 per cent renewables were just around the corner, the end of hydrocarbons was preordained, and anyone who pointed to physics or economics was treated as some combination of backward, compromised or dangerous. But now the evidence has grown too big to ignore.

Across Europe, the retreat to energy realism is unmistakable. TotalEnergies is spending €5.1 billion on gas-fired plants in Britain, Italy, France, Ireland and the Netherlands because wind and solar can’t meet demand on their own. Shell is walking away from marquee offshore wind projects because the economics do not work. Italy and Greece are fast-tracking new gas development after years of prohibitions. Europe is rediscovering what modern economies require: firm, dispatchable power and secure domestic supply.

Meanwhile, Canada continues to tell itself a different story — and British Columbia most of all.

A new Fraser Institute study from Jock Finlayson and Karen Graham uses Statistics Canada’s own environmental goods and services and clean-tech accounts to quantify what Canada’s “clean economy” actually is, not what political speeches claim it could be.

The numbers are clear:

• The clean economy is 3.0–3.6 per cent of GDP.
• It accounts for about 2 per cent of employment.
• It has grown, but not faster than the economy overall.
• And its two largest components are hydroelectricity and waste management — mature legacy sectors, not shiny new clean-tech champions.

Despite $158 billion in federal “green” spending since 2014, Canada’s clean economy has not become the unstoppable engine of prosperity that policymakers have promised. Finlayson and Graham’s analysis casts serious doubt on the explosive-growth scenarios embraced by many politicians and commentators.

What’s striking is how mainstream this realism has become. Even Bill Gates, whose philanthropic footprint helped popularize much of the early clean-tech optimism, now says bluntly that the world had “no chance” of hitting its climate targets on the backs of renewables alone. His message is simple: the system is too big, the physics too hard, and the intermittency problem too unforgiving. Wind and solar will grow, but without firm power — nuclear, natural gas with carbon management, next-generation grid technologies — the transition collapses under its own weight. When the world’s most influential climate philanthropist says the story we’ve been sold isn’t technically possible, it should give policymakers pause.

And this is where the British Columbia story becomes astonishing.

It would be one thing if the result was dramatic reductions in emissions. The provincial government remains locked into the CleanBC architecture despite a record of consistently missed targets.

Since the staunchest defenders of CleanBC are not much bothered by the lack of meaningful GHG reductions, a reasonable person is left wondering whether there is some other motivation. Meanwhile, Victoria’s own numbers a couple of years ago projected an annual GDP hit of courtesy CleanBC of roughly $11 billion.

But here is the part that would make any objective analyst blink: when I recently flagged my interest in presenting my research to the CleanBC review panel, I discovered that the “reviewers” were, in fact, two of the key architects of the very program being reviewed. They were effectively asked to judge their own work.

You can imagine what they told us.

What I saw in that room was not an evidence-driven assessment of performance. It was a high-handed, fact-light defence of an ideological commitment. When we presented data showing that doctrinaire renewables-only thinking was failing both the economy and the environment, the reception was dismissive and incurious. It was the opposite of what a serious policy review looks like.

Meanwhile our hydro-based electricity system is facing historic challenges: long term droughts, soaring demand, unanswered questions about how growth will be powered especially in the crucial Northwest BC region, and continuing insistence that providers of reliable and relatively clean natural gas are to be frustrated at every turn.

Elsewhere, the price of change increasingly includes being able to explain how you were going to accomplish the things that you promise.

And yes — in some places it will take time for the tide of energy unreality to recede. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be improving our systems, reducing emissions, and investing in technologies that genuinely work. It simply means we must stop pretending politics can overrule physics.

Europe has learned this lesson the hard way. Global energy companies are reorganizing around a 50-50 world of firm natural gas and renewables — the model many experts have been signalling for years. Even the New York Times now describes this shift with a note of astonishment.

British Columbia, meanwhile, remains committed to its own storyline even as the ground shifts beneath it. This isn’t about who wins the argument — it’s about government staying locked on its most basic duty: safeguarding the incomes and stability of the families who depend on a functioning energy system.

Resource Works News