Category: Guest Authors

More Americans Mean Less Wilderness

By Joe Guzzardi 

For decades, federal immigration laws have been a hot-button issue. Nearly 55 years ago, on October 3, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Although few could have imagined it at the time, the ensuing decades would be rife with contentious debates about immigration and its impact on U.S. society. Both expansionists and those who favor less immigration make compelling arguments.

But, because the agenda-less U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey provides irrefutable data, few dispute immigration’s effect on population growth. Expansionists prefer not to talk about the link between immigration and population growth, but they dare not challenge it. In February, the Census Bureau projected that within the next four decades, about 75 million more people will live in the U.S., a total population of more than 400 million, up from the nation’s current 330 million. The Bureau attributes more than 85 percent of the 75 million increase to immigration, and births to immigrants.

Yet expansionists keep proposing illogical arguments for more people. In California, the Victorville Daily Press published an op-ed written by Mario Lopez that advocated for more immigration. Keep in mind that California is besieged with affordable housing shortages, a growing homeless count, raging wildfires, water shortages, and the nation’s worst income inequality rate. In Victorville specifically, 23 percent of the city’s 122,400 predominantly Hispanic residents live in poverty, and only 55 percent are in the civilian labor force. Lopez should explain how a larger immigrant population will help his neighbors find jobs that will enable them to climb out of poverty.

Pro-growth arguments more ill-conceived than Lopez’s have recently appeared in mainstream publications. Jennifer Wright, political editor at-large for Harper’s Bazaar, inferred that the U.S. could have a more generous immigration policy because the globe’s 7.8 billion people could fit into Texas. The U.S. has plenty of room, Wright foolishly contends. Wright’s preposterous theory might be true technically, assuming that people are willing to live on top of each other, but because of insufficient water, food and inadequate sanitation, among other items, most would be dead within a short period. Ditto for plants and animals.

Environmentalists, however, hammer home the reality – the U.S. cannot have high immigration levels and, at the same time, protect its national resources or its residents’ quality of life. Author Dave Foreman, founder of Rewilding Earth, expressed the risks of high immigration to the U.S. and its environment in his concise formula:
 More Immigration = More Americans = Less Wilderness. 
Foreman’s message is somber, but important. Unequivocally, Foreman blames humans and their “breathtaking population boom” for the what he calls the unprecedented mass extinction of plants and animals. As one of hundreds of examples, consider North Carolina Natural Heritage Program’s Wesley Knapp, one of 16 expert botanists whose findings the international journal, “Conservation Biology,” published.

Knapp’s team found that most of the 65 documented plant extinctions occurred in the western U.S., a region that botanists rarely explore and which has been relentlessly developed over the last three decades. Because many extinctions likely occurred before scientists explored the area, it is extremely likely the 65 documented extinctions vastly underestimate the actual numbers of plant species that have been lost.

Achieving sustainability becomes more elusive daily, and the U.S. is running out of time. A study from the Center for American Progress titled “How Much Nature Should America Keep?” found that “The U.S. has lost the equivalent of nine Grand Canyon national parks, or 24 million acres (9,712,455.41 hectares) of natural area, between 2001 and 2017 due to agriculture, energy development, housing sprawl and other human factors….”

Sensible immigration totals must be all Americans’ goal, not a cause for political divide. Policies that limit immigration to sustainable levels aren’t anti-immigrant; existing lawfully present immigrants would be a primary beneficiary of less immigration.

Years ago physicist and sustainability champion Al Bartlett posed a question that today’s expansionists should answer:
 “Can you think of any problem in any area of human endeavor on any scale, from
microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way aided,
assisted, or advanced by further increases in population, locally, nationally, or globally?” 
Expansionists and proponents of reduced immigration should be willing to enter into a respectful dialogue that seeks the answer to Bartlett’s important query.


Joe Guzzardi is a Progressives for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org.

Juan Williams Black Jobs Don’t Matter

By Joe Guzzardi

With less than two months until Election Day 2020, more and more news stories are focused on the pivotal African-American vote. In a New York Timesop-ed written by Fox News contributor Juan Williams, the author boldly wrote that “the black vote now defines American politics.” Williams’ commentary went on to provide a long list of reasons that Black Americans should support challenger Joe Biden over incumbent President Donald Trump.

Boiled down, Williams contends that African-Americans dislike President Trump because they perceive him as a racist. He believes that four more years of President Trump would be bad for Black and Latino Americans. As Williams wrote, “Black Americans have had enough,” and for them defeating Trump is “personal.” Fox News viewers know that Williams can barely contain his disdain for President Trump.

On one count, Williams is spot on. Come November the Black vote, which is 12 percent of the national electorate, could determine whether President Trump remains in the White House or whether Biden achieves his five-decade long dream of ascending to the U.S. presidency. President Trump hopes to capture more than the 8 percent of the Black vote he received in 2016. The President’s 2020 reelection campaign created Black Voices for Trump, a program designed to increase African-American voter turnout and help him garner 15 to 20 percent of the Black bloc. Expect to hear President Trump tout his pre-COVID-19 success that helped drive Black unemployment to a record low 5.5 percent last year.

Had Williams in his 2,100-word column added fact to his opinion, he could have concluded that a Biden presidency would be disastrous for African-Americans and other minorities. Biden proposes through expanded immigration to increase the work-authorized population by more than 15 million people. In short, Biden, on his website, wants to grant amnesty to roughly 11 million unlawfully present aliens, to provide an easier entry path for asylees and refugees, to protect from deportation deferred action for childhood arrivals and their families, to maintain the diversity lottery, to expand employment-based visa categories for both low- and high-skilled workers, to dilute border and interior enforcement, and to defend temporary protected status recipients.

Biden’s immigration platform means millions of employment-authorized persons will enter the labor pool to compete for American jobs – not Williams’ well-paid, elitist job, but the type of employment that helps lower-skilled, less-educated minorities begin their ascent to the middle class. Williams is typical of mainstream media globalist reporters who refuse to connect the dots between immigration and work authorization which impedes upward mobility for minorities. The media has powerful allies that also favor waves of new employment-authorized immigrants even though they contribute to Black workers’ unemployment. The 55-member strong Congressional Black Caucus is united in its immigration advocacy, and votes accordingly.

A Biden presidency and the mass immigration that would accompany it will derail the economic recovery that blue-collar workers are just now enjoying. A Bloomberg report titled “Factory Owners Hiking Pay to Lure Workers Even with Jobless Rates” found that staffing firms in key U.S. cities are offering bonuses of up to $5 an hour to bolster the existing $12 an hour wage. Jobs posted with a wage scale of $12 – $14 an hour went wanting, but $17-hour positions were eagerly snapped up. President Trump’s tighter immigration policies have contributed to higher wages.

T. Willard Fair, the Urban League of Greater Miami’s chief executive officer, spoke the tough, honest talk that the Black Congressional Congress should heed. Fair once told the Miami Herald that amnesty for illegal workers is more than a slap in the faces of Black Americans; it’s an economic disaster that weakens African-Americans’ political empowerment. And in his congressional testimony, Fair said that “the interests of black Americans are clear: no amnesty, no guest workers, enforce the immigration law.”

History proves that Fair is right. The low-immigration, tight labor market years from 1924 to 1965 spawned impressive wage gains for all Americans. As the “Journal of Economic Literature” confirmed, white males’ real incomes expanded two-and-one-half-fold between 1940 and 1980, but for Black American men, those same incomes quadrupled, and closed the economic gap between the races.

Black Americans must listen to a true and fearless voice like Fair’s to help them reach the long-elusive economic stability that they deserve.

 
Joe Guzzardi is a Progressives for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org.

Juan Williams Black Jobs Don’t Matter

Remember American Workers This Labor Day

By Joe Guzzardi

Labor Day kicks off the final stretch toward the Election Day showdown between incumbent President Donald Trump and the Democratic challenger, former Vice President Joe Biden. After months of COVID-19-related layoffs, furloughs, outright firings, permanent closing of many small businesses and bankruptcy filings by major corporations, restoring jobs will be among the top issues on the candidates’ agendas.

Many of President Trump’s talking points are a mirror image of his successful 2016 platform: to prioritize American jobs, wages and security; to establish new immigration controls to boost wages, to ensure that available jobs are offered to Americans first and to curb foreign workers’ uncontrolled admission and thereby protect the economic well-being of already present lawful immigrants.

If re-elected, President Trump promises to, among his other goals and under the banner of “fighting for you,” create ten million new jobs and, as he did in 2016, “prohibit American companies from replacing United States citizens with lower-cost foreign workers.” But during his four years in office, President Trump got mixed-to-poor grades on ending American corporations’ cheap labor addiction.

On the positive side, within the last two months, President Trump intervened in the Tennessee Valley Authority’s plan to displace its American employees with H-1B visa workers. Hundreds of American jobs were saved. But, on the negative side, during his first term, President Trump has been unable – or perhaps unwilling – to keep other globalist corporations like Amazon, Google and Deloitte Consulting from tapping into the vast cheap labor pool.

Another related and alarming development: last week, President Trump moved to promote Chad Wolf, acting Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, to the position. From the perspective of U.S. tech workers, Wolf’s resume is troublesome. Before joining the White House, Wolf worked for the National Association of Software and Service Companies, a lobbying group that promotes outsourcing and offshoring of U.S. tech jobs to India.

In more disappointing news for unemployed and under-employed Americans, the State Department gutted President Trump’s June Executive Order that paused several employment-based visa categories until December 31. President Trump’s base hailed his action as a positive intervention on struggling American workers’ behalf. But, the State Department, in an advisory written in the vaguest imaginable language, will admit entry to foreign nationals that it deems, without having to provide a scintilla of evidence, essential to “the immediate and continued economic recovery of the U.S.” Deep State bureaucrats negated President Trump’s order, and opened the door for foreign nationals to take jobs that Americans deserve.

Also contributing to President Trump’s lukewarm immigration grade is his refusal to promote E-Verify, the federal program that confirms an individual’s legal privilege to work in the U.S. Analysts are in near unanimous agreement that E-Verify represents a more effective deterrent to illegal entry and hiring than a Southwest border wall. President Trump may have forgotten that winning an election only gave him possession of the ball; he still needed to score touchdowns.

Candidate Biden’s positions vis-à-vis immigration would, in the aggregate, provide work authorization to millions. Most obviously, Biden’s support for an amnesty that would be granted to more than 10 million illegal aliens would correspondingly expand the labor pool by that total. Biden also favors more visas for low- and high-skilled workers.

The economy has failed too many Americans. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a 10.2 percent unemployment rate in July. That doesn’t include the millions of workers who want but cannot find full-time jobs. African-Americans as well as other minorities, the less-educated and lower-skilled Americans can’t begin their climb toward the middle-class as long as they are unfairly and unnecessarily forced to compete with cheaper overseas labor.

Whether President Trump or Biden wins in November, putting American workers first should be the first and foremost goal of either.

Joe Guzzardi is a Progressives for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org.

Remember American Workers This Labor Day

Trump Action Proves Employers Will Hire Locally

By Joe Guzzardi

Vindicated! For employment-based visa critics who have railed for more than three decades that each entering worker represents a lost U.S. job, late August provided more evidence to support their thesis. Reports from Colorado and New Jersey confirmed the obvious: if foreign nationals aren’t around to take coveted summer jobs on the J-1 visa – billed as offering cultural and educational exchange opportunities – then employers hire locally.

When President Trump’s Executive Order paused several employment-based visas that include the J-1 Summer Work Travel (SWT) visa, Colorado ski resorts panicked. Aspen Skiing Company officials, which typically hire 400 J-1 exchange workers each season, told the media that their concern over a potential worker shortage kept them tossing and turning. But to their surprise, lo and behold, U.S. kids submitted applications. Young Americans are available, willing and eager to earn extra cash by taking jobs at Colorado ski resorts in Aspen, Vail, Buttermilk and Snowmass.

On the nation’s eastern seaboard, in New Jersey, came yet more hopeful news. The Casino Association of New Jersey, Unite Here Local 54, the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority, and city and state governments announced plans to scale back J-1 employment. The coalition announced that it would begin a vocational training program to prioritize jobs for residents. As the Casino Association of New Jersey and Caesars Entertainment regional presidents said: put Atlantic City people to work fir

If those New Jersey casinos had attempted to set betting probabilities on whether the cheap labor lobby would have sued President Trump for his Executive Order, the odds would have been prohibitively high. Several ski resort operators have taken legal action to block President Trump’s Executive Order and keep their easy access to cheap labor flowing. Annually, thousands of international students from dozens of countries take domestic jobs.

The J-1 SWT program is a hurtful hoax that robs young Americans of opportunities to earn money to put toward their college educations and contribute to family incomes. Here’s a sampling of why the SWT program, often referred to as the Exchange Visitor Program, is such a scam. To begin with, the July report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics pegged youth unemployment at 18.5 percent. Given the July unemployment level, up from 9.1 percent a year ago, no intellectual argument can be made that employers need foreign-born workers.

But, naturally, advocates advance staggeringly vapid arguments that the SWT is good for the nation. Try this preposterous talking point on for size. Fariba Hicks, vice-president for Camp Counselors USA, which annually sponsors more than 15,000 international J-1s, insists that those young workers actually create jobs. Talk about not computing! Overseas workers take American jobs, but at the same time create jobs?

Nice try, Fariba!

Camp Counselors USA and similar placement agencies soak naïve young foreigners for fees that range from $1,500 to $5,000 per head. Employers under-pay their gullible international students, allegedly present for cultural exchange, but at the same time, their bosses are exempt from making Medicare and Social Security payments, a sweet deal for them. A Government Accountability Office report found that only about 40 percent of J-1s engage in cultural exchange.

Another insulting pro-cheap worker visa claim is that employers simply cannot find Americans to fill their jobs, a statement they make with a straight face, but that measures 10 out of 10 on the absurdity scale. Employers have repeatedly said, summer after summer, that they can’t find kids to work at beach resorts, national parks, community swimming pools, tony restaurants, gelato shops or amusement parks. The truth, as everyone knows, is that those are among the most sought-after teenage jobs which, had they not been routinely given to SWTs, would generate fierce domestic competition for hiring.

True vindication in the battle to put American workers first, however, can’t come until Congress changes course from its 30-year preference to hire abroad.


Joe Guzzardi is a Progressives for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org.

Trump Action Proves Employers Will Hire Locally

Kamala Wants Foreign Workers For Silicon Valley

By Joe Guzzardi

Vice Presidential nominee Kamala Harris’ Democratic National Convention acceptance speech failed to provide answers to voters seeking insight into how new leadership might help them get a better job or earn a higher wage.

Polling taken just a week before Harris addressed the DNC found that the economy remains the most vital issue to nearly eight in 10 American voters. But instead of presenting a plan that presidential nominee Joe Biden and Harris could support to help U.S. workers achieve a more fulfilling life through better jobs, she hammered away at President Trump, old news to voters. Harris unwisely ignored former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo’s recommendation that, in an effort to reach the widest possible audience, “You campaign in poetry; you govern in prose.”

For American workers, the 2020 decade will be a challenge, and an administration dedicated to their advancement is critical. Since 1990, working-class Americans have been fighting, but losing the battle, against corporate America in the uphill struggle for fair wages, and for working conditions that would instill a sense of pride in the jobs that they hold.

Unfortunately, Harris is firmly aligned with the forces determined to keep American workers oppressed. The word “oppress” may seem overly harsh, but the affinity by Silicon Valley and Wall Street for candidate Harris confirms the point. The New York Times wrote that Harris is “a VP that big business can back,” noting that “Silicon Valley is happy about seeing a familiar face.”

An Oakland native, who became California’s junior U.S. senator after her earlier career as San Francisco attorney general and then California AG, Harris has spent three and a half years in the Upper Chamber. During that time, her voting record proves that she’s actively worked against the very constituency that she purports to advocate for – African Americans, other people of color and lawfully present immigrants.

Votes for higher immigration levels, which Harris has cast more than 50 times in her relatively brief Senate career, mean that more employment-authorized workers will be available to employers. Because many of those new and pliable workers will accept lower wages, Americans risk, at best, stagnant wages or, at worst, displacement, terrible outcomes for those who Harris claims to defend.

Immigration, and therefore new work authorization, is already at record levels – more than 1 million legal permanent residents annually plus 750,000 employment-based visa holders per year. Add to the 1.75 million overseas workers entering in the U.S. labor market annually nearly 1 million more foreign nationals employed on Optional Practical Training and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals work permits. DACA and OPT were administratively created, but never congressionally approved.

Harris cosponsored Sen. Dick Durbin’s (D-Ill.) bill, the Keep Stem Talent Act, that would create more than 50,000 additional foreign-born science, technology, engineering and math workers annually who would then compete directly against U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents who earned college STEM degrees.

Moreover, Harris is the lead Democratic sponsor of S. 386, the Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act, a bill which would lift the per-country caps on employment visas, and thereby give Indian tech workers an H-1B visa monopoly, an outcome that harms U.S. tech workers.

Even though little is less popular with voters than amnesty for unlawfully present aliens – Congress has been unable to pass various amnesty bills in prior years – Harris is all-in. In a nutshell, as a U.S. senator, Harris proposed amnesty for all of the 11 million plus illegal residents. In separate bills, she cosponsored more expansive temporary protected status legislation and a farm workers’ amnesty.

Now, as the Democratic prospective Vice President, Harris is united with top-of-the-ticket Joe Biden’s candid amnesty commitment. Biden’s websitepromises to, within his administration’s first 100 days, take more than 20 steps that would greatly increase immigration levels, and which would in turn create more work-authorized residents, and dramatically eliminate interior immigration enforcement. At the center of Biden’s immigration vision is his pledge to “create a roadmap to citizenship” for 11 million aliens.

Harris’ voting record in the U.S. Senate is readily available. It tells more than any stump speech she’ll make between now and November.


Joe Guzzardi is a Progressives for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org.

Kamala Wants Foreign Workers For Silicon Valley

Pompeo Subverts Trump Order On Immigration

By Joe Guzzardi
 

Capitol Hill insiders speculate that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has already begun, although somewhat stealthily, his 2024 campaign to replace President Donald Trump in the White House. Whether President Trump wins or loses in November, the Beltway gossip is that Pompeo will be the GOP front runner. In recent weeks, Pompeo delivered rousing, campaign-style speeches at the Nixon Library, in Orange County, Calif., near where he grew up in Orange, and in Iowa.

Even Pompeo’s staunchest political enemies grudgingly admit that he has a spectacular resume which would position him well during a rough and tumble campaign grind. Before becoming Secretary of State, Pompeo directed the Central Intelligence Agency, and was elected four times from Kansas to represent the 4^th District in the U.S. House. Pompeo held positions on the House Intelligence Committee, as well as the Energy and Commerce Committee, and the House Select Benghazi Committee. Before his political career began, Pompeo graduated No. 1 in his 1986 U.S. Military Academy West Point class. Pompeo served with distinction in the U.S. Army, and then earned a Harvard Law School degree where he helped edit the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy. For more than a decade after graduating from Harvard, Pompeo had a successful career in the Kansas aerospace industry.

Impressive though Pompeo’s curriculum vitae may be, as a presidential candidate he would need President Trump’s endorsement. And whether such a commendation would be forthcoming in light of the State Department’s gutting of the president’s June Executive Order that paused employment-based visa entries through 2020 remains to be seen. Inarguably, when the State Department effectively canceled the Executive Order by identifying dozens of so-called exceptions to the EO which would keep the inflow of H-1Bs, L-1s and other visas that authorize employment, it landed a direct slap to President Trump’s face. The employment-seeking foreign nationals that President Trump put on hold, the State Department waved in.

The State Department’s intervention is so hurtful to the American workers whom President Trump hoped to defend that profiteering immigration lawyers hailed the move as “expansive.” Immigration lawyer Greg Siskind, who has never met an immigration expansion bill that he didn’t embrace, could barely contain his glee when he alerted his foreign national client base, “They [Trump administration officials] are backing off … that could be good news for you guys.”

The State Department’s bulletin grants exceptions to foreign nationals “… whose travel would be in the national interest.” The memo opens the floodgates to virtually any prospective international employee that Silicon Valley, The Wall Street Journal and other immigration advocates brazenly insist are necessary to keep the U.S. economic engine moving forward. That’s a lie that’s persisted for 30 years, facilitated the displacement of thousands of skilled U.S. workers, and has done irreparable damage to the workers’ families. In corporate America and in the establishment media, cheap labor reigns supreme.

Whether State Department minions checked with Pompeo before their outrageous action is unclear. But given what’s known about the Deep State, it’s unlikely that it sought prior approval. And had they pursued Pompeo’s okay, his congressional immigration grade hints that he might have given it his blessing. Although Pompeo voted solidly on most immigration-related issues like favoring border security, and rejecting amnesty, in 2015, he voted to grant President Obama the authority to, via Trade Promotion Authority, fast track expanded immigration levels without the consent of Congress.

The next move is President Trump’s. The president should summon Pompeo to the Oval Office to read him the riot act, demand that he identify the saboteurs, and force them to rescind their bulletin. President Trump’s message to Pompeo can be short and sweet: Americans, and not worldwide employment-based visa holders, deserve U.S. jobs.


Joe Guzzardi is a Progressives for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org.

Pompeo Subverts Trump Order On Immigration

Congress Abandons 30 Million Unemployed

By Joe Guzzardi

From Congress’ 435 U.S. representatives and 100 senators, only about 10 percent can be classified as solidly pro-American worker. Their immigration voting records prove their inexplicable indifference to American workers’ fates. Whether the immigration category is lawful permanent residents who arrive at the rate of more than 1 million annually, refugees, asylees and employment-based visa holders, all receive work authorization. Illegal immigrants caught and released at the border receive parole, a federal pardon that qualifies them for work permits which in turn allows them to remain in the U.S. and to be legally hired. Finally, illegal immigrants that successfully get past the border often enter the black-market economy, and are hired off the books.

While some in Congress vote to slow certain immigration categories, only about 50, at most, are behind a broad-based immigration slowdown. Proof: in 2017, senators Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and David Perdue (R-Ga.) introduced the RAISE Act that would have eliminated the unnecessary diversity visa, slowed refugee intake, limited chain migration to a petitioner’s nuclear family, and slowed legal immigration over the next decade by about 50 percent. The bill’s sole two co-sponsors who felt reducing legal immigration by half over the next decade and eliminating population-busting chain migration, thereby limiting the total numbers of work permits issued, were Cotton and Purdue, a pathetic testimonial to Congress’ cynical attitude toward U.S. workers.

Congress has at least a half-dozen ethnic caucuses that defend special interests. But nowhere in Congress is there a caucus that defends American workers. And because no such caucus exists, over decades, millions of U.S. jobs have been outsourced, and millions of U.S. workers have been displaced.

During the last week in July in a brazen effort to promote the welfare of Indian nationals but to the detriment of U.S. tech workers’ futures, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) made another in a series of 2020 attempts to pass S. 386, an outsourcing H-1B bill that would eliminate the country cap that restricts the number of Green Cards awarded to each country to 25,000.

If Lee were to prevail, for the foreseeable future, Green Cards would be issued almost exclusively to Indians. In its analysis of S. 386, the Congressional Research Service concluded that passage of legislation would benefit Indians, and to a lesser extent Chinese nationals, but at the expense of other overseas citizens hoping to migrate to, and work in, the U.S. Lee, by the way, is routinely identified as a conservative, and was rumored to be on President Trump’s short list to replace Justice Anton Scalia on the Supreme Court.

The House of Representatives and the Senate have powerful, influential India caucuses that speak with one voice on India-related issues. The Senate caucus dates back to 2004, and today’s House caucus on India and Indian Americans was established in 1933, and is the largest congressional House country-specific caucus. Yet, to repeat, no single congressional caucus exists to defend Americans against what is a decades-long pattern of importing foreign labor and outsourcing U.S. jobs to overseas nations.

Consistent with Capitol Hill’s disregard for the fate of U.S. workers, insiders report that nearly every GOP senator and the Department of Homeland Security support Lee’s proposal. And should Lee’s proposed legislation reach President Trump’s desk, the same insiders predict that, because so many corporations that benefit from cheap labor H-1Bs also donate to the chief executive’s campaign, he’ll sign it into law. This is a complete disgrace for the candidate who, if elected, promised to reform legal immigration to serve American workers, and “to bring our jobs back home.” Now that 30 million Americans are unemployed, the nation could sure use those jobs President Trump pledged to deliver.

Not only has President Trump failed on H-1Bs, he’s joined with Congress in their mutual abandonment of E-Verify, the free, easy-to-use online system that confirms in a matter of seconds whether an employee is legally authorized to work in the U.S.

Congress has kicked around E-Verify without mandating the program since 1996 when it was named the Basic Pilot program. Since 1997, E-Verify has been available to corporations nationwide. Yet the pro-donor, pro-cheap labor Congress refuses to implement E-Verify which would protect U.S. workers from the illegal hiring scourge.

For a quarter of a century Congress has been vigorous in its support of the cheap labor lobby. Imagine instead if Congress had battled as steadfastly on Americans’ behalf. Then U.S. workers’ adjusted-for-inflation wageswouldn’t have been flat for the same 25 years.


Joe Guzzardi is a Progressives for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org.

Congress Abandons 30 Million Unemployed Congress Abandons 30 Million Unemployed