Category: Joe Guzzardi

From Coal Mines To Cooperstown, A Baseball Story For Saint Patrick’s Day

By Joe Guzzardi

In 1869, Hughie Jennings became the ninth of 12 children born into a Pittston, Pa., coal mining family. At age 12, Jennings dropped out of school to work as a breaker boy in the mines near Scranton where he picked slate from coal for 90 cents a day. Amid clouds of coal dust and the machinery’s rushing roar, breaker boys worked bent over backless wooden benches to perform their 10-hour-a-day tasks. A 1900 Bureau of Mines report found that colliery accidents killed 411, injured 1,057, and made 230 widows and 524 orphans.

But from those hardscrabble days, Jennings eventually entered the Hall of Fame based on his sterling career as a ball player and manager. The Irish-American also became an admired trial lawyer. In his book “EE-YAH,” Society for American Baseball Research historian Jack Smiles tracked Jennings’ career all the way back to when he was a 90-pound catcher for hometown ball clubs like the Moosic Anthracites. In 1889 Hughie signed for $5 a game with a Lehighton, Pa., semi-pro team, and left the mines behind for good. Jennings always said that what most motivated him throughout his career was to play so skillfully that he’d never return to the pits.

Jennings’ first contract called for $50 monthly, a fortune compared to his miner wages. By 1894, Jennings landed with the old National League Baltimore Orioles where he teamed up with Irish-American players still revered today. Under manager Ned Hanlon’s guidance, John J. McGraw, Wee Willie Keeler, Joe Kelley, Dan Brouthers, Wilbert Robinson and Jennings – Hall of Famers all – the Orioles won three straight pennants. Jennings emerged as baseball’s top shortstop, both offensively and defensively.

During the Orioles’ championship years, Jennings had some of the best-ever seasons by a major league shortstop. In 1895, he hit .386, scored 159 runs, collected 204 hits, knocked in 125 runs, and stole 53 bases. In 1896, his performance was even better, as he hit .401, behind Cleveland’s Jesse Burkett’s .405, with 209 hits, 121 RBI and 70 stolen bases. To get on base, the fearless Jennings would do anything. His 1896 hit-by-pitch total, 51, is a still-standing major league record. The Orioles’ winning formula was old-fashioned, inside baseball – the bunt, the hit-and-run, the stolen base and the Baltimore chop. The Orioles cheated, too, like tripping opposing players as they rounded third and headed for home.

After a chaotic period where various teams bid for his services, during autumn 1899, Jennings attended the Cornell Law School in the off-season. Obtaining a law school diploma was a high enough priority that Jennings refused to report to the Brooklyn Superbas until June so that he could complete his spring term. In exchange for his tuition, Jennings coached the Cornell baseball team. Jennings fell two semesters short of graduating from Cornell, but he passed enough classes to take the bar exam, and was admitted to practice in Maryland and in Pennsylvania.

After a four-year stint piloting the Orioles, in 1907, Jennings took over the Detroit Tigers and young Ty Cobb. The Tigers won three straight pennants, but won only one World Series. The firebrand Cobb, however, blossomed. He won 12 batting titles in 13 years and set stolen base records. Jennings stayed with Detroit until 1920, and then took over the New York Giants for parts of 1924 and 1925 seasons.

Sportswriters called the firebrand Jennings “Ee-yah” for his third base coaching box antics, “Hustling Hughie” for his aggressive infield play and “Big Daddy,” not for his 5’8” stature, but because he served as a role model for the 100 other men who followed him from the Northeastern coal mines to the major leagues. In the final three winters of his life, 1925-27, Jennings contracted tuberculosis and meningitis before, at age 58, passing away in 1928 at his Scranton home.

Joe Guzzardi is a Society for American Baseball Research and Internet Baseball Writers Association Member. Contact him at guzzjoe@yahoo.com.

From Coal Mines To Cooperstown, A Baseball Story For Saint Patrick’s Day

Schools Struggle to Accommodate Migrant Students

By Joe Guzzardi

Regardless of how bitter the immigration argument – and the debate routinely sinks to new hostility lows – both enforcement advocates and expansionists should agree that open borders must not be allowed to disrupt public education. If an individual’s station in life prevents him from enrolling his children in private schools, then a solid public education is essential. Without proper education in the basics, the nation’s children will have a long climb toward success in adulthood.

No one can argue persuasively that the border surge, which includes hundreds of thousands of K-12 age youths, will do anything except further drag down the nation’s failing public school system. Everything in America’s public schools reflects crisis mode.

For public schools, the trend is headed in the wrong direction and tumbling freefall-style further into the abyss. Enrollment is down, and chronic absenteeism is up. Shortages abound – teachers, substitutes, bus drivers and maintenance personnel. School board meetings are battle zones that often require security to prevent fisticuffs. For 9-year-olds, math and reading test scores have plummeted to their lowest levels in decades. This is a key age for creating a strong academic foundation. Black and Hispanic students fell further behind white students. Reliance on mental health services has become more common. Violence, including shootings and sexual assaults against teachers, has escalated.

Into this chaotic cauldron, waves of migrant children have entered the U.S. from more than 100 nations, and they speak dozens of different languages and dialects in our K-12 schools. Some have never attended school, and others possess only a rudimentary understanding of how a classroom functions. Enrollments occur on a rolling basis throughout the school year. No matter how disruptive migrant enrollment is to the existing student body and to the teachers, the process is a constitutional imperative.

In June 1982, the Supreme Court issued Plyler v. Doe, a landmark decision which held that that states cannot constitutionally deny students a free public education based on their illegal immigrant status. By a 5-4 vote, the Court ruled that any fiscal resources which could be saved by excluding illegal immigrant children from public schools were far outweighed by societal harms that might be created from denying an education to unlawfully present children.

The Supreme Court has ruled, but the teachers and school administrators are the ones who must somehow impart a quality education despite the challenges that the migrants represent. And with teachers now coping with the ongoing enrollment of non-English speaking students, citizen children are at a disadvantage. When polled, a plurality of working-class, blue-collar Americans said that illegal immigration has made their local school systems worse off, a new study revealed.

The latest Rasmussen Reports survey showed that 40 percent of Americans who earn less than $30,000 felt that illegal immigration made their local schools less effective, while 41 percent of those who earned $30,000 to $50,000 reached the same conclusion.

Among working class, middle class and upper-middle class Americans, less than 10 percent say illegal immigration has made their local schools better, while 34 to 45 percent say there has not been much of an impact. In his House Judiciary Committee testimony earlier this year, U.S. Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) stated the obvious: public schools packed with non-English speakers are a disadvantage to citizen children eager to learn and advance. “What the Democrats have never explained is how our schools are made better by packing classrooms with non-English speaking students,” McClintock said.

Nationally, the English language learner (ELL) student population will continue to grow rapidly, the predictable consequence of an open border. The projected number of school-age immigrant children increased from 12.3 million in 2005 to 17.9 million in 2020, a total which accounted for most of the school-age population growth during the period. Most of today’s immigrant children will require ELL services.

During the 1950s, California’s public schools ranked among the nation’s best. But decades later after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 and the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, California drifted toward the bottom of the heap. One reason for the steep decline: California’s K-12 ELL enrollment is 1.1 million students. Attending to immigrant children’s special academic needs, including developing language skills, detracts from teacher time that would otherwise be allotted to citizen children. After two years of remote instruction, children need every moment to catch up and shouldn’t be required to share valuable classroom time with illegal immigrants.

Schools Struggle to Accommodate Migrant Students

Senate Again Introduces E-Verify

By Joe Guzzardi

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) reintroduced legislation to help businesses comply with immigration laws by certifying that their employees are legally authorized to work in the United States. The “Accountability Through Electronic Verification Act” would permanently authorize and expand the E-Verify program, an internet-based program. The bill requires employers to use the program within one year of enactment to determine workers’ eligibility. Employers must terminate workers that E-Verify cannot confirm as legally work-authorized, and those employers are subject to increased penalties.

Grassley said that businesses nationwide use E-Verify to help them comply with our immigration laws, reduce illegal immigration incentives, and provide Americans and other legal workers job safeguards. Expanding the system to every workplace, Grassley added, will improve all businesses’ accountability “and take an important step toward putting American workers first.”

In addition to the most obvious E-Verify advantage – protecting U.S. jobs – the program has countless other indirect benefits. Illegal border crossings and visa overstays would be dramatically reduced or eliminated once unscrupulous employers could no longer hire illegal aliens.

Because E-Verify would eliminate the jobs magnet, Customs and Border Protection agents, as well as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, would be, in large part, relieved of the headaches of asking for identification from non-English speaking foreign nationals. Freed from the tedium of dealing with job seekers, law enforcement personnel could, assuming the White House and the Department of Homeland Security allow them to carry out their duties, including pursuing and arresting cartel criminals and human traffickers. With E-Verify in place at work sites, people who can’t get jobs will move home voluntarily. Family separation would become a thing of the past.

A Carnegie Mellon University study confirmed that Arizona’s mandatory E-Verify law played an important role in self-deportation among illegal immigrants coming from and returning to Mexico. The study noted that, after E-Verify was mandated, the average return migration rate to Mexican states nearly quadrupled over the time period observed. Mexican states like Sonora, where roughly 50 percent of migrants had previously settled in Arizona, experienced 30 percent larger growth in its return migration rate compared to a state with weaker connections to Arizona.

Another E-Verify advantage is that implementing the program would help end identity theft, a huge problem which in 2020 created losses to unsuspecting consumers that totaled $56 billion. Employee information taken from an I-9 form, the paper-based employee eligibility verification form used for all new hires, is compared against existing Social Security Administration and DHS databases. If the data doesn’t match, then the probability is that the SSN doesn’t belong to the applicant. Nancy Berryhill, in 2018 an Acting Commissioner of Social Security, testified to the House Subcommittee on Social Security. She concluded: “Mandatory use of EVerify by employers would help reduce the incidence of fraudulent use of SSNs.”

With the protections that E-Verify offers for American workers, and the deterrent that creates against illegal immigration, the wonder is why past bills, similar in most respects and dating back more than three decades, haven’t received congressional traction. The harsh, but inescapable, truth is that the donor class wants cheap labor, and Congress’ objective is to keep donors happy, U.S. workers be damned.

Senate Again Introduces E-Verify

DC Voting Subverts Sovereignty

By Joe Guzzardi

Bit by bit and with considerable assistance from their advocates, illegal aliens are inching their way toward nationwide voting privileges. In 2018, San Francisco began to register illegal immigrants and other noncitizens over age 18 whose children attend K-12 public schools. The noncitizens could then vote in school board elections. Although San Francisco’s bill was struck down in August 2022, similar benefits have been granted in Chicago, as well as some cities in Maryland and Massachusetts.

Vermont, another example, approved noncitizen voting legislation in 2021, and overrode Republican Governor Phil Scott’s veto. Advocates’ arguments, whether in Vermont, San Francisco, Chicago or Maryland, are consistent. The illegal immigrants have students in the school district, and as community members, they may pay taxes. They claim that they therefore have a right to participate in the decisions that affect their children and their lives. The reality that the Vermont constitution expressly states that “every person… who is a citizen of the United States…” shall have the right to vote is, to the state legislature, insignificant.

The highest profile effort to grant noncitizens, including aliens, voting rights is playing out in sanctuary city Washington, D.C. Last fall, the City Council passed a bill that would allow the district’s approximately 42,000 voting age noncitizens the privilege to cast a ballot. The residency requirement was set at a mere 30 days, meaning that potentially anyone can vote, including foreign diplomats, visiting professors, au pairs and summer interns. The bill passed by a 12-1 margin. True to form, Councilmember Charles Allen said that the noncitizens “deserve a right to have a say in their government.”

Unlike the cases in Maryland, Illinois and Vermont, the Constitution grants Congress exclusive control over the district’s city council-passed laws. In other words, D.C. voting laws are valid only to the extent that Congress tolerates them. Showing the common sense that Congress is too often missing, on February 9, the House voted down the district’s proposal 260-162, with 42 Democrats joining Republicans.

Concerns about noncitizen voting are twofold. Specific to D.C., Muriel Bowser won the 2022 Democratic mayoral nomination by 11,000 votes. The Migration Policy Institute found that D.C.’s 2019 illegal alien population was about 24,000, more than enough to have altered the election’s results. Looking ahead and evaluating D.C. dysfunction, citizen voters might not want to elect Bowser to a fourth term; the district has no term limits. Violent and property crimes are up under Bowser, and 98 percent of U.S. cities are safer than D.C. Homelessness is so pervasive in D.C. that National Park Service officers and Washington, D.C.’s police department evicted dozens of people from the District’s largest homeless encampment. Despite the D.C. chaos, noncitizen votes could sway the election toward Bowser, or another similarly minded candidate.

The second and broader concern is that, as Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy said, “These elections can set the laws that cover the White House, Congress and even government agencies. If we set this precedent, other cities will follow, and faith in our elections will plummet.”

History proves McCarthy’s theory that once noncitizen and illegal alien rewards begin, turning back is tough. Consider that driver’s licenses and in-state university tuition, once reserved for citizens, are now readily available to illegal immigrants. Bank accounts, which once required Social Security numbers, can be obtained with a foreign national’s unexpired passport or the easy-to-acquire Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN). Licenses, instate tuition for residents and banking relationships have been quietly incorporated into illegal immigrants’ welcome-to-America package.

The stakes in the House effort to preserve constitutional voting rights for citizens alone are high, and the consequences of letting them slip away are dire. The bill requires the Senate’s approval and President Biden’s signature. Since the administration’s goal is D.C. statehood, district-wide voting is a step in that direction.

DC Voting Subverts Sovereignty

Parolee Immigrants Want White-Collar Jobs

By Joe Guzzardi

President Joe Biden, the magic man who can convert illegal immigration into legal immigration with the stroke of his pen, took bows at his State of the Union address. Biden tried to convey the impression that granting immigration parole to illegal aliens from Nicaragua, Haiti, Venezuela and Cuba converted their status to legal. Biden boasted: “Since we launched our new border plan last month, unlawful migration from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela has come down 97 percent.”

Patting himself on the back during his SOTU speech, Biden neglected to mention that his latest sovereignty-destroying immigration scheme is unlawful and unconstitutional. Since his inauguration, Biden has consistently broken immigration laws and mocked Americans who want enforcement, not $20 billion-dollar giveaways to 5.5 million unlawfully present foreign nationals.

Backing up to Biden’s disingenuous assertion that illegal immigration “from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela has come down 97 percent…,” it’s true on its face. But the back story that explains the how and the why that precipitated the drop is more telling and reveals — again! — the extent to which Biden blatantly breaks immigration laws.

In early January, the Biden White House and the Department of Homeland Security issued a press release that promised “border enforcement measures to improve border security” and — for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans — “create additional safe and orderly processes.” The migrants, the press release claimed, are “fleeing humanitarian crises.” Going forward, 30,000 migrants a month, 360,000 annually, will be parole-eligible, but conveniently for Biden, because they will be entering legally, their totals won’t be included among the numbers for illegal immigrant border surgers.

In 1996, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 gave statutory power to temporarily “parole” aliens into the United States “in emergency cases, such as the case of an alien who requires immediate medical attention” or “a witness or for purposes of prosecution.” But to curb parole abuses, the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act clearly stated that only on a case-by-case basis, and assuming compelling humanitarian reasons or urgent public need, can parole be granted.

Obviously, 30,000 per month is neither case-by-case nor a pressing public necessity. The rewarded aliens, with unknown intentions, will be arriving from far-left, authoritarian countries, including impoverished Haiti. For citizens concerned about safety and security from extremists, DHS assured the public that all migrants are thoroughly vetted, a physical impossibility since too little confirmable data is immediately available to U.S. officials.

While aliens from the parole-designated countries aren’t lined up at the border, the 97 percent decline Biden touted, the migrants are nonetheless U.S. bound, and likely lifetime residents. Here’s an example of how parole will work out: as the Los Angeles Times reported, a 25-year-old Cuban engineer applied online for parole. Within a week, he landed in Florida, hoping to eventually earn a master’s degree from MIT, and then get a white-collar IT job. The young Cuban’s dreams conflict with many U.S. high school grads who also aspire to quality education and high-paying jobs, a reality that Biden doesn’t care about. If the Cuban migrant’s dreams go awry, he can collect welfare and await U.S. citizenship, the greatest gift. Look for the Cuban’s tale to endlessly repeat itself as other parolees arrive.

Enforcement advocates wonder what lawbreaking immigration venture Biden will embrace next, and whether Congress will intervene to save the nation from the president’s lawlessness. They won’t have to ponder long. The Canadian border is the latest sieve for illegal immigrants. The Border Patrol’s Swanton, Vermont, sector, responsible for protecting New Hampshire, Vermont and the northern tip of New York, is generally the most active region in the north.

Agents say that they’ve detected “historic” levels of illegal crossings, with a nearly 900 percent increase in encounters. Included are Canadians, Indians, Chinese, Mexicans, Filipinos, Brazilians and Columbians. The word is out: Biden and his Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Majorkas are patsies. The Biden-Mayorkas tandem’s message to the world is come, settle and thereby deny Americans of their own dreams for a better life.

Joe Guzzardi writes about immigration issues and impacts.

Parolee Immigrants Want White-Collar Jobs

Woodrow Wilson Was Greatest Baseball Fan

By Joe Guzzardi

U.S. presidents’ love affair with baseball dates back to George Washington who wrote in his journal that during Valley Forge he “sometimes throws and catches a ball for hours with his aide-de-camp.” Every president since Washington, except Teddy Roosevelt and Calvin Coolidge, had a passion for base ball, as Washington then referred to the game. Roosevelt thought baseball was a “mollycoddle game,” and Coolidge attended to appease his passionate-fan wife, Grace.

Abraham Lincoln, upon hearing in 1860 that he won the presidential nomination, allegedly responded, “They’ll have to wait a few minutes [for his formal acceptance] until I have another turn at bat.” In 1893, Herbert Hoover was Stanford University’s shortstop, and at age 88 called himself one of the sport’s “oldest fans.” In 1910, William Howard Taft became the first president to toss out the now-traditional first pitch.

Dwight Eisenhower played semi-pro baseball under the pseudonym “Wilson” which, luckily for Ike, preserved his West Point scholarship. Richard Nixon was an avid fan, a players’ favorite and knowledgeable enough about baseball to be seriously considered as a potential MLB commissioner. George H. W. Bush, a 1948 Yale University graduate, was a standout Eli first baseman who played in the first College World Series and kept his well-oiled MacGregor mitt handy in his Oval Office’s desk drawer.

But after historians researched the baseball archives, and read countless news accounts, the nearly unanimous consensus is that Woodrow Wilson, the former Princeton University president, New Jersey governor, and from 1913-1921, a two-term 28^th president, was baseball’s biggest fan.

From an early age, baseball and its intricacies absorbed Wilson. As a child, Wilson sketched in his geometry notebook a hand-scribbled diagram of a baseball diamond, and labeled it “Base Ball Ground.” Wilson later played varsity center field for Davidson College and was Princeton’s assistant manager. Scouts said that Wilson was “a fine player,” but his teammates countered that the scholarly outfielder was often too caught up in his studies to show up for practice.

Author Curt Smith in “The Presidents and the Pastime: The History of Baseball & the White House” wrote that Wilson absorbed baseball more deeply than any White House occupant who preceded or succeeded him, an opinion that Washington Senators’ owner Clark Griffith, premier Senators’ first baseman Joe Judge and the peerless Ty Cobb all agreed with. Griffith had been watching Senators’ Opening Days for nearly 30 years, more than enough time to make a sound evaluation. Judge concurred that “Wilson was by far the best fan. He knew a lot of us players and came out to the park often. He’d run his car right on the field and we’d put a player who wasn’t in the game at each corner of the car to watch for fly balls.” Through a special arrangement between Wilson and Griffith, Wilson’s chauffeur would enter the stadium through an outfield gate where the then-ailing president could watch the game undisturbed. But Cobb paid Wilson the highest compliment when he called the president “the greatest American.”

In Wilson’s final years, the travails of World War I and a stroke had taken their toll on the former president, but he still found solace in baseball. Wilson invited his secretary Randolph Bolling to his Washington home’s basement, referred to as “the dugout,” where they reviewed the previous day’s box scores, and second guessed the losing managers. At his life’s end, infirm from his stroke, plagued with constant migraines and painful dyspepsia, baseball provided Wilson with a few, rare calming moments. Wilson died in 1924, age 67, one year before his beloved Senators won the World Series.

Joe Guzzardi is a Society for American Baseball Research and Internet Baseball Writers Association member. Contact him at guzzjoe@yahoo.com.

Woodrow Wilson Was Greatest Baseball Fan

Don Zimmer Married At Home Plate

By Joe Guzzardi

During Don Zimmer’s 66-year career in professional baseball, the scrappy infielder shook Babe Ruth’s hand, posed for pictures with Clark Gable and Lana Turner, played with Brooklyn Dodgers’ Hall of Famers Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella, played as a New York Mets for Casey Stengel, managed the Boston Red Sox when Carlton Fisk hit his 1975 12^th inning World Series home run to defeat the Cincinnati Reds, and coached the 1978 New York Yankees when Bucky Dent broke bean towners’ hearts his with game winning, American League East clinching four-bagger. Zimmer played and managed winter baseball in Japan, Cuba and Puerto Rico where he managed Roberto Clemente and Willie Mays. In all, Zimmer played for six major league teams, managed four and coached 11. Except for a single Social Security check he cashed between gigs, Zimmer never earned a penny outside of baseball.

But despite Zimmer’s Hollywood experiences and his baseball achievements – he was a two-time All-Star and a six-time World Series champion – he was most proud of his 1951 home plate marriage to Carol Jean Bauerle before a night game in Elmira, New York, where, as a top Brooklyn Dodgers’ prospect, he had worked his way up to the Class A Pioneers. Zimmer and Carol Jean, nicknamed “Soot” by her German grandmother, had been sweethearts since the 10^th grade at Cincinnati’s Western Hills High School when the couple were on a girl-asks-boy hayride. A star quarterback, the basketball team’s starting guard and shortstop on the Ohio state championship baseball nine, Zimmer was the state’s most widely recognized high school athlete. As Soot recalled the hayride, “We were 16, and were together from then on.”

Soot attended and documented every Opening Day for each of the teams that her husband played in, managed or coached during Zimmer’s 66 years in baseball. In 2015, about 18 months after Zimmer’s death, Tampa Bay Times reporter Lane DeGregory visited Soot at her Seminole, Fla., condo where she shared the contents of more than 70 scrapbooks and photo albums she had lovingly compiled.

Soot’s cabinets were filled with “Zim” bobbleheads and baseballs that Ronald Reagan, Robert Redford, Pete Rose and Reggie Jackson had signed. Also, the shelves contained the scrapbooks Soot meticulously stacked in chronological order. With loving dedication, Soot collected everything printed about Don, including team bios, photos, stories, programs and baseball cards, and tiny print box scores. She cut out each entry, underlined Zim’s name with a blue pen, and then gently pasted the clipping into the pages of her scrapbooks.

In her senior year, Soot went to the local dime store, bought a scrapbook, and the cardboard corners used long-ago to secure pictures in place. The first scrapbook was conceived, intended as a gift to her boyfriend, and compiled evenings after she completed her homework assignments. Soot subscribed to every Ohio newspaper whose city had a ball park. Outside of Ohio, Soot asked friends to mail her newspapers. As Zim’s baseball skills improved, stories about him started appearing in more widely distributed newspapers, eventually landing him on the front page of The New York Times. Soot’s albums had clippings from more than 10,500 games played in hundreds of ballparks.

From 2004 to 2014, Zimmer worked for the Tampa Rays as a senior advisor, his last baseball job. On Opening Day 2014, Zimmer, wearing number 66 to honor his years spent in professional baseball, rode across the diamond in a golf cart, too weak to walk. Fans gave him a standing ovation. Two months before their 63^rd anniversary, Zimmer died from heart and kidney failure. But Soot had one more event to chronicle. A Rays’ representative called to tell Soot that the team would honor Zim on Opening Day 2015, hang his jersey from the Tropicana Field rafters and retire number 66. Then age 84, Soot had a few empty pages in one of her volumes to add the latest Zim stories. “Good thing there’s still room in here,” Soot joked, “Too old to start a new scrapbook.” Soot, now 92, treasures her memories of life with Zim, on and off the field.

Joe Guzzardi is a Society for American Baseball Research and Internet Baseball Writers Association member. Contact him at guzzjoe@yahoo.com.

Don Zimmer Married At Home Plate

Population Growth Would Slow With Low Immigration

By Joe Guzzardi

The United States Forest Service (USFS), a Department of Agriculture agency that administers the nation’s 154 forests and manages 194 million acres of land, released an analysis which estimated that, every day, the nation loses 6 million acres of open space. USFS defines open space as publicly or privately owned, protected or unprotected areas that include forests, grasslands, farms, ranches, streams, rivers and parks. The 6 million acres lost to development at what USFS called “an alarming rate” hampers a functioning ecosystem, agriculture, forest health and recreational pleasures.

Although the USFS developed its “Forests on the Edge” program to emphasize preserving open space, no educational campaign can keep up with U.S. population growth and the urban sprawl that it generates. A NumbersUSA study, “Vanishing Open Spaces, Population Growth and Sprawl in America,” analyzed the projected long-term decline in per capita farmland. Using the projected cropland losses based on 1982-2010 data, and U.S. Census Bureau population estimates, the study found as follows: available cropland will have declined from 1.9 acres per person in 1982 to 0.3 acre per person in 2100, an 84 percent cropland loss decrease. After two centuries of nonstop development, little of the remaining acreage would be in pristine condition.

Assuming the Census Bureau 2050 and 2100 population projections prove accurate, population of 404 million and 571 million, respectively, and available cropland per person declines to a corresponding 0.7 and 0.3 acre per person, government officials should be gravely concerned. Available food production will be drastically slashed – too many mouths to feed and not enough farmland to produce the food. 

Selling farmland to developers is lucrative and often too good a deal for farmers to decline. Farming is a tough, often uncertain business. Crops can be hit with blight; bad weather can impact yield, and crop prices may decline. The land is more valuable to developers than to the farmer-owner. Farmland might be worth $10,000 or $20,000 per acre, but as residential or commercial land, rezoned, it might be valued at $100,000 or more per acre.

The core issue is the federal government’s inability – some say refusal – to adopt sustainable population policies. The Census Bureau has identified immigration and births to immigrants as the population growth’s primary driver. In February 2020, the Census Bureau published “A Changing Nation: Population Projections Under Alternative Immigration Scenarios.” It showed that between 2020 and 2060 different legal immigration levels – zero, low and high – could change the population in those years by as much as 127 million people, with estimates ranging anywhere from 330 million to a high of 447 million total U.S. residents. 

In the zero-immigration scenario that also accounts for out-emigration, natural increases – births minus deaths – are the only way population can increase. Negative natural increases will, in the zero-immigration scenario, create a shrinking population with annual declines starting in 2035 and continuing at an accelerated pace through 2060.

The Census Bureau is the ultimate Washington, D.C. nonpartisan agency. Many wonder, then, why the Biden administration, and the many Republican and Democratic administrations that preceded the current one, have ignored, or merely paid lip service to, the population conclusions. The Census Bureau acknowledges that its zero immigration calculations are hypothetical, but low immigration, generally considered about 500,000 or about half the current admission level, would be an overdue step in the right direction. Under the high immigration estimate, the 2060 population will increase 124 million to 447 million. The 5 million-plus ongoing border surge, which grows numerically every day, is excluded from the Census Bureau’s data, but if included would increase the 2060 population increase well beyond the 124 million.

Even if legal immigration is reduced to the Census Bureau’s low-level, the U.S. will still remain the world’s most welcoming nation, open to refugees, asylees and others. At the same time, reduced immigration will help protect the natural resources that make the U.S. the preferred destination of immigrants.

Joe Guzzardi is a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist who writes about immigration and related social issues. Joe joined Project 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  dot com.

Population Growth Would Slow With Low Immigration

Amnesty Is Not Border Crisis Solution Despite Biden Claim

By Joe Guzzardi

Leading up to President Biden’s State of the Union speech, reporters speculated about how much time, if any, he would give to the Southwest border crisis. The answer is now known. From his one hour, 12 minutes, and 40 seconds-long speech – the eighth-longest SOU address of the last 60 years, and exceeded only by President Bill Clinton, four times, and President Donald Trump, three times, Biden spent about 60 seconds on his open border debacle. Some analysts said that the brief one-minute reference proved that Biden is indifferent to America’s eroded sovereignty that the border chaos created. Others claimed that the border mess is too embarrassing for Biden to acknowledge, and the less he said, the better for him, and his fellow Democrats.

At about the one-hour mark, Biden launched his foray into immigration. Biden shouted out: “America’s border problems won’t be fixed until Congress acts.” He then spoke more specifically about the direction in which he wants Congress to act. “If we don’t pass my comprehensive immigration reform, at least pass my plan to provide the equipment and officers to secure the border and a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers, those on temporary status, farm workers, [and] essential workers.”

Biden followed the well-traveled path that immigration expansionists have long trekked. Whatever problem society might face, the solution today, yesterday, and always is comprehensive immigration reform that includes citizenship. But granting amnesty to an unknown total of illegal immigrants already residing in the U.S. has no relationship to the sovereign-busting open border. Amnesty doesn’t equate to a secure border. More to the point, no one on Capitol Hill knows the precise illegal immigrant total living within the interior. Estimates range from 12 million to 30 million. Illegal aliens have to be unlucky to get deported under Biden and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Immigration and Customs Enforcement removed 72,177 illegal immigrants in FY 2022, slightly more than the 59,011 deported in FY 2021. That number in turn marked a sharp drop from the 185,884 deported in FY 20, and 267,258 in FY 2019.

Biden may want to dismiss the border, or he may be satisfied that his welcome-the-world policy is correct. But the reality is that under Mayorkas, border agents have processed and release more than five million aliens into the interior. Another million or so migrants, called gotaways, have slipped past agents, and are roaming among the general population. No one is certain of their identities, their intentions or their current whereabout. No one is looking for them either, and if they’re located, ICE cannot, as per a Mayorkas memo, deport them. Mayorkas does not have the constitutional authority to rewrite settled immigration laws, but in the Biden administration, legality in immigration law is inconsequential. The only thing Biden and Mayorkas know about immigration laws is that they refuse to enforce them.

The illegal alien border surge will cost U.S. taxpayers $100 billion, and counting. The $100 billion is the open border’s dollar cost. But the human cost, disregarded by Biden and Mayorkas is tragic. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention wrote that over 150 people die every day from overdoses related to synthetic opioids like fentanyl. Drug cartels have taken advantage of the open border to traffic fentanyl, and have built a multi-billion business around their deadly drug.

In his Spanish-language rebuttal, Mexico-born U.S. Rep. Juan Ciscomani (R-Ariz.) said: “In my home county in Southern Arizona, fentanyl overdoses are the number one cause of death among young people — outpacing car crashes.”

A post-SOTU good news, bad news summary: amnesty has no chance to pass in the 118th Congress, but the nation will have to endure another two years of the lawless Biden administration, and its determination to destroy historic America.

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.

Amnesty Is Not Border Crisis Solution Despite Biden Claim