Category: Guest Authors

Border Surge Inundates School Districts

By Joe Guzzardi

As worldwide migrants continue to pour across the Southwest border, the financial and emotional toll on communities directly affected mounts.

In El Paso, officials reported that, during September, up to 1,500 illegal immigrants, mostly Venezuelans but also Cubans and Central Americans, arrive daily. Providing for the migrants’ needs has overwhelmed El Paso. Unable to keep up, El Paso created its own Migrant Support Services Center and authorized staff to negotiate a $6.9 million contract with a Virginia-based nonprofit that will manage the facility.

Humanely caring for the migrants and accommodating the illegal border crossers will require El Paso to spend $300,000 daily, or nearly $10 million, in September alone. The fiscal outlay that El Paso makes on the migrants’ behalf means that funds normally allocated for police and fire departments as well as other social services that the city routinely makes available to its residents are nearly depleted.

In a letter to Mayor Oscar Leeser, city council members implored him to issue a Disaster Declaration to help keep El Paso’s residents and its newly arrived migrant population safe. The council members’ letter noted that the current inflow is “unsustainable” and “simply unfair to our community.” A disaster declaration shifts the responsibility for the aliens away from El Paso and to the state and federal governments. In the end, however, whether funds come from municipalities, Texas or the federal government, taxpayers are on the hook for the bulk of the migrants’ resettlement costs. The Federation for American Immigration Reform calculated that the migrants’ resettlement will cost taxpayers $20 billion annually in education, healthcare, welfare, justice and law enforcement. Including got-aways, an estimated 5 million migrants have illegally crossed the border since Biden took the White House. Many have been relocated, also at taxpayer expense, into the interior.

The border crisis, and its inevitable fallout, will soon become apparent to parents with school-age children. Because the 1982 Supreme Court Plyer v. Doe ruled that public schools are legally required to enroll students regardless of their immigration status, K-12 classrooms nationwide, and the many teachers responsible for educating the children, will be overwhelmed.

In April, at the Austin Independent School District, teachers protested the 400-plus student influx of Central American students at two high school campuses. The educators complained that they had to give their lessons in hallways and conference rooms. Keep in mind that many of those students don’t speak English and may not speak Spanish either. While Spanish is the most common language, ten other languages are spoken throughout Central America, including Mayan dialects. For teachers, effective communication can be difficult.

Austin’s frustrated teachers have plenty of company. Los Angeles County, Florida’s Miami-Dade County, Texas’ Harris County and New York enrolled 4,579, 2,306, 7,170 and 11,000 migrants, respectively. Teachers will have to brace for more students, many unfamiliar with classroom learning. A Health and Human Services report showed that through July, 107,742 unaccompanied minors were released into their sponsors’ custody. The report is understated since it includes only cities that relocated 50 or more UACs (unaccompanied alien children), and would also exclude migrants not placed with families. In all, over the last four years, an estimated 2 million non-English speaking students have been added to the nation’s public schools, a costly and burdensome obligation with which teachers, school officials, parents and communities must grapple.

In the months immediately ahead, more illegal immigration will lead to greater pressure on school districts. And more illegal immigration is absolutely on the way – some estimates project a 7 million total by the time Biden’s term ends. Under oath, Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz, a Biden appointee with three decades of dedicated law enforcement, testified that he believes illegal border crossings will increase at an exponential rate.

The reason for Ortiz’s grim forecast is that there are “no consequences” imposed by the Biden administration on illegal aliens who break U.S. immigration law. But for sovereign America, the short- and long-term consequences of unchecked illegal immigration are many and irreversible. School districts’ immigration-spawned predicament is one example from many which exposes the contempt that the Biden administration has for America and her citizens.

View Online

Joe Guzzardi is a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist who writes about immigration and related social issues. Joe joined Progressives for Immigration Reform in 2018 as an analyst after a 10-year career directing media relations for Californians for Population Stabilization, where he also was a Senior Writing Fellow. A native Californian, Joe now lives in Pennsylvania. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org.

Border Surge Inundates School Districts

Environment Platform Includes Protecting Border

By Joe Guzzardi

The latest mid-term election polling shows that Republicans and Democrats are dead even. In January, the same polling firm Statista had the GOP ahead by four points. Other polls like 538.com indicate more or less the same outcome. But if voters have learned anything since the 2016 and 2020 elections, it would be to distrust polling firm projections.

Results from 2020 polls favored Democrats, with Susan Collins (R-Maine), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and Steve Daines (R-Mont.) as likely losers. But Collins, 6.5 points behind, or so said the pre-election pollsters, won by 8.6 points. The other five candidates that the prognosticators wrote off as doomed won handily.

Pollsters have an explanation to defend their theory that congressional Democrats might still retain the majority, despite record inflation, rising crime rates, a botched Afghanistan withdrawal, student debt forgiveness, billions of dollars squandered in support of what’s become an endless Russia-Ukraine war, and an open border. It is that the GOP has nominated poor candidates in key swing states. Among the races pollsters are tracking most closely are Blake Masters in Arizona vs. incumbent Mark Kelly, Herschel Walker in Georgia vs. incumbent Raphael Warnock, Adam Laxalt in Nevada vs. incumbent Catherine Cortez Masto, and Mehmet Oz vs. John Fetterman in Pennsylvania where incumbent Republican Pat Toomey is retiring.

A state official who has no congressional voting record, Fetterman proudly notes that his wife’s family overstayed their visas at which time their immigration status converted to unlawfully present, a clue that he favors more immigration. Fetterman’s website says he supports a “humane” immigration system, a vapid remark which confirms that he endorses Biden’s status quo.

The GOP challengers, all within striking distance, may be getting short shrift from pollsters. The candidates were persuasive enough to capture primary nominations; they’re not too tongue-tied to debate. More important, going into the general election, the GOP has as much fodder – listed above – and primo debate material as any high-office challengers in history, thanks mostly to President Biden’s slipshod governance, and the incumbents’ whole-hearted endorsement of it.

On the key open borders issue, Masters, Walker and Laxalt have the benefit of launching an offensive against their opponents’ immigration voting records. Their rivals, Kelly, Warnock and Cortez Masto are, like Fetterman and Biden, all-in on open borders. A review of the incumbents’ immigration votes found that each has consistently voted against reducing amnesty fraud, against curbing illegal immigrants’ rewards, against ending unnecessary employment visas, against stricter border enforcement and against more rigorous interior enforcement.

Stumping on reducing immigration can be problematic since such a focused campaign would trigger untruthful but potentially damaging racist allegations. A winning campaign would include linking immigration to unsustainable population growth, an indisputable fact that the Census Bureau confirms. Census Bureau data predicts that by the mid-21st century the U.S. population will increase to more than 400 million from its current 333 million, a greater than 20 percent increase.

More than half of that growth will be attributable to immigration and births to immigrants. For comparison’s sake, the Center for Immigration Studies’ researchers, based entirely on the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey and the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplements, found that in 2017 there were 35.8 million legal and illegal immigrants living in the U.S. who arrived from 1982 to 2017. Further, these immigrants had 16.9 million U.S.-born children and grandchildren. In total, immigration added 52.7 million people to the U.S. population between 1982 and 2017, accounting for a little over 56 percent of population growth during this 35-year time period.

For the nation’s population to increase by more than 65 million people, as the Census Bureau predicts, in less than 30 years, creates a grave danger that will exacerbate existing environmental problems like water shortages and land lost to urban sprawl.

Opinions about immigration and its effects often differ. But sentiments about the environmental future Americans want to ensure for their children and grandchildren are consistent. Americans want open spaces and nature’s bounty to remain for future generations to enjoy, a goal that ever-more immigration makes impossible. To win and to prove the pollsters wrong again, the GOP platform must emphasize immigration’s harmful, unwanted consequences of unchecked population growth and the environmental degradation that accompanies it.

View Online 

Joe Guzzardi is a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist who writes about immigration and related social issues. Joe joined Progressives for Immigration Reform in 2018 as an analyst after a ten-year career directing media relations for Californians for Population Stabilization, where he also was a Senior Writing Fellow. A native Californian, Joe now lives in Pennsylvania. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org.

DOJ May Intervene In Florida Transport Plans

By Joe Guzzardi

Hillary Clinton, Yale Law School ’73, said on MSNBC that sending 50 illegal immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard was “literally human trafficking” by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Harvard Law School, ‘05. The MSNBC co-host, Joe Scarborough, University of Florida School of Law ‘90, accused DeSantis of using innocent people as political pawns.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Harvard Law School ‘95, suggested that DeSantis and fellow Texan Gov. Greg Abbott, Vanderbilt University Law School, ’84, should send more migrants to blue cities and states. Cruz, pointing to the millions of illegal immigrants that the administration has admitted, bussed and flown around the nation, called President Joe Biden, Syracuse University School of Law ’68 and former Senate Judiciary Chair, “the biggest human trafficker on the face of the planet.” Biden demanded that the governors stop their “un-American” political stunts.

Clinton, Scarborough and Biden have support from like-minded lawyers. Professors from Notre Dame, Georgetown and other universities, along with civil rights advocates, came down hard on DeSantis and Abbott. The harshest criticism came from California Gov. Gavin Newsom who requested that the Department of Justice open an investigation into the Martha’s Vineyard flights on charges that the migrants were “kidnapped.”

Move along, nothing to see here, just angry lawyers going after each other hammer and tongs. The voting public, however, is grappling with a contradiction. If the Biden administration can order Customs and Border Patrol to put thousands of aliens on buses and planes to send them throughout the interior of the United States, then the same flexibility should apply to the governors, assuming, of course, that the migrants agree to be flown to Martha’s Vineyard or driven to Washington, D.C. or New York.

Jonathan Turley, George Washington University law professor, provided his perspective. Turley wrote that to call transporting aliens kidnapping is “to take a flight from one’s legal senses.” On his blog, Turley stated that human trafficking, a legal term, is altogether different than moving humans in traffic. The governors’ actions aren’t an attempt to put humans, through fraud, coercion or force, into peonage, involuntary servitude or sex slavery. In conclusion, Turley wrote that many objections could be made to the governors’ transport programs, but not kidnapping and human trafficking.

The tensions between the states and the cities are just beginning. DeSantis promised to fly more migrants to other sanctuary cities, but not necessarily Martha’s Vineyard. That way, DeSantis explained, the sanctuaries can “put their money where their mouth is.” A possible 2024 presidential candidate, DeSantis may sense that while some American voters support immigration, they object to Biden-style open borders.

Political expediency is at play in Texas, too. Abbott is up for re-election in November, and he’s counting on removing illegal immigrants as integral to his victory. The border invasion is expensive. As part of its $4 billion Operation Lone Star program, Texas has installed more than 42 miles of concertina wire along its Southern border near Eagle Pass and Del Rio, two communities through which millions have passed.

A potential roadblock – a boulder, really – may stand in the governors’ way. In a statement, the Boston nonprofit, Lawyers for Civil Rights, promised to investigate “the inhumane manner in which they [the Martha’s Vineyard migrants] were shipped across the country, to determine the responsible parties, whether state or federal criminal laws against human trafficking and kidnapping were violated, and what other legal remedies are available.”

Even though no evidence exists that the migrants were treated inhumanely, and as Turley warned, trafficking and kidnapping are specious charges, LCR will press on. The legal advocates hope to gather pro bono attorneys, immigration experts, law enforcement and social services providers.

If that’s not enough, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco confirmed that the DOJ is reviewing inquiries like Newsom’s calling for an investigation. The DOJ’s involvement, inevitable in the Biden administration, especially if the governors escalate, would be the end of the line for the governors’ strategy to give sanctuary cities a tiny taste of their own medicine. Not a single voice among the many urged border enforcement.

View Online

Joe Guzzardi is a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist who writes about immigration and related social issues. Joe joined Progressives for Immigration Reform in 2018 as an analyst after a ten-year career directing media relations for Californians for Population Stabilization, where he also was a Senior Writing Fellow. A native Californian, Joe now lives in Pennsylvania. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org.