Category: Joe Guzzardi

US Depending On Luck To Avoid Terror Catastrophe

By Joe Guzzardi

The U.S. has been lucky since 9/11. Despite the nation’s open borders, the country has so far avoided another major attack on the homeland. The operative words are “so far.”

Look at the large number of unvetted people flooding into America, and the surprising reality is that the nation has, at least to date, avoided an attack. August numbers from the Department of Homeland Security are the latest publicly available monthly data and show an all-time record number of illegal alien border encounters. August encounters totaled 304,162, up from July’s 245,286. During fiscal year 2023, more than 2.9 million illegal aliens were encountered; most were processed and released into the interior.

In all, the number of known aliens who entered unlawfully and are still living in the U.S. under temporary or conditional status is a record 3.6 million. President Joe Biden’s administration, in violation of established immigration law, uses humanitarian parole as a major component of its lawless border abuse. Parole, which includes work authorization, is intended for emergency case-by-case bases, and not for collectively green-lighting thousands of illegal immigrants.

The 3.6 million paroled migrants is exclusive of gotaways which since January 2021 totaled nearly 1.6 million. Also excluded are the thousands who have arrived through the CBP One app, an entry-facilitating mechanism outside of immigration law, but nevertheless illegally implemented by the Biden White House.

In January, DHS promised that the newly created app would be limited to (unlawfully) admit 360,000 foreign nationals; in July, CBP announced that the program would be expanded to 522,000 admissions. The administration originally designed the app to minimize bad optics and the critical press that border overcrowding generated during the Haitian surge of 2021 at Del Rio, Texas. Because of technical malfunctions and user unfamiliarity, however, migrants often disregard the app in favor of illegal immigration’s traditional crossing method — they wade across the Rio Grande unimpeded.

No checklist of how aliens arrive is complete without mentioning the middle-of-the-night flights from the border into major hubs like New York City or to less populated cities like Scranton, Pa. Those destinations may or may not be jumping-off points to join relatives, also often illegal immigrants. At taxpayer expense, and using a transportation system described as a “breathtakingly complex network,” Boeing 737s flew as many as 240 passengers per journey under cover of darkness.

When analyzing the unprotected border, and the terrorism threat it represents, add “no one knows” to “so far.” Since the arriving aliens are unvetted — their past histories, their intentions and current locations unknown — “no one knows” sums up what the future may bring. The migrant-sending nations include countries that have unbending anti-American sentiments. Arrivals, mostly single adult males, originate in China, Syria, Yemen, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Egypt, Pakistan, Mauritania, Uzbekistan, Venezuela and Turkey.

Terrorists determined to perpetrate death and destruction on U.S. soil play the long game, undeterred when their early efforts fail. After 9/11:

· On 5 November 2009, the Fort Hood, Texas, shooting: U.S. Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan, 39, who served as a psychiatrist at Fort Hood and was the son of Palestinian immigrants, opened fire on his fellow service members, leaving 13 dead and 29 wounded.

· On 15 April 2013, the Boston Marathon bombing: Dzhokhar, 19, and Tamerlan, 26, Tsarnaev planted two bombs near the Boston Marathon’s finish line. The explosion killed three and injured more than 180 people.

· On 2 December 2015, the San Bernardino Attack: Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, and his wife Tashfeen Malik, 29, shot off more than 100 rounds during a holiday event. The Islamic-inspired terrorists killed 14 and wounded 22.

· On 31 October 2017, the NYC truck attack: ISIS-inspired Sayfullo Saipov, 29, used a rented Home Depot flatbed pickup truck to drive down a bike path which killed eight and injured 11.

As of July, Homeland Threat Assessment alarmingly reported that immigration officials encountered what they described as a “growing number of individuals” who appear on the FBI’s terrorist watchlist and were detained while trying to enter via the U.S. southern border. Compared to fiscal year 2022 when CBP apprehended 100 individuals whose identities matched those on the Terrorist Screening Dataset, as of 30 Sept. 2023, the total had increased to 160.

Given the sovereignty-breaking reality about alien arrivals, their numerical totals, their countries of origin and the always-welcoming Biden administration, the odds are increasingly high that, as long as the border remains unguarded, terrorism attacks against U.S. citizens are a near-certainty.

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US Depending On Luck To Avoid Terror Catastrophe

Defend Borders or Close West Point and Annapolis

By Joe Guzzardi

The troubling news that U.S. veterans hoping to see the Army-Navy game in Foxboro, Mass., had their hotel reservations canceled to provide illegal aliens shelter could be a blessing in disguise, assuming the vets vote in unison to preserve the country they’re sworn to defend.

Kicking vets out of their lodging to reward aliens with coveted hotel rooms represents the latest afront to Americans by open borders advocates. Open borders are a continuing, shameful offense and assault on U.S. sovereignty. Most offended are veterans. Data that the Department of Veterans Affairs released showed that the veteran population is 19 million.

Imagine the 19 million plus their spouses, children, siblings, friends and neighbors disgusted by the audacity of federal and state officials sanctioning the unceremonious booting of vets from their rooms, leaving them to fend for themselves to find alternate housing for an event that’s sold-out months in advance. Massachusetts Democratic Gov. Maura Healey claimed to be “distressed” when she learned that a New Jersey travel agent had displaced the vets to make rooms available to the migrants. Healey’s “distressed” claim cannot be taken at face value. Like most of Massachusetts, Healey is an immigration expansion advocate.

Massachusetts’ migrant crisis is so acute that Lt. Gov. Kim Driscoll urged Bay State taxpayers to open their homes to illegal aliens. Reacting to Healey’s declaration that migration has put the state in emergency mode, Driscoll asked residents who might have “…an extra room or suite in your home, [to] please consider hosting a family. Safe housing and shelter is our most pressing need.” Driscoll said that Massachusetts is spending about $45 million monthly in taxpayer dollars on migrants’ shelter needs.

Some support Driscoll, and cited Massachusetts’ history as one of the first colonies founded by European migrants. The supporters have ample chance to back up their words with action. Massachusetts has 5,600 illegal alien homeless families that include infants and pregnant women, an 80 percent increase from the 3,100 families a year ago.

The governor could also step up to the plate. Healey has a four-bedroom, single family home in Arlington, Mass., that she shares with her partner. Healey’s living arrangement frees up three bedrooms, and would take some of the burden off the state she governs. Or, Healey could make sheltering aliens a condition of continued employment for the state’s 438,000 workers. As long as the northern and southern borders remain open, and unchecked migration continues, no solution that immigration advocates dream up is, in their view, asking too much. Remember Driscoll’s overview of the role residents should play in the state’s right- to-shelter crisis: “Everyone has something they can share.”

As long as the federal government welcomes millions of unvetted, impoverished aliens, including convicted criminals and FBI terrorist suspects, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis might as well shut their doors. The mission of the graduates of the institutions is to protect the homeland, a goal that the White House actively undermines. Under Biden, the homeland is wide open for the world to access. A House Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security and Enforcement report found that through March 2023, 99 percent of the arriving 2.1 million foreign nationals remain in the U.S. Only 6 percent have been thoroughly vetted, showing a complete disregard for citizens’ “safe housing” that Driscoll rhapsodized about.

In the Biden administration’s latest nonsolution to a state’s migration catastrophe, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas will send a team to Boston to, in government-speak empty words, “assess the current migrant situation and identify ways to improve efficiencies and maximize our support for communities that are addressing the needs of migrants.” The feds have already sent $2.8 billion in taxpayer funds to help Massachusetts out of a problem that has no monetary resolution.

New West Point grads, new Annapolis grads and veterans, along with their relatives and friends, might total 50 million, a large enough bloc to swing the election toward a much-needed candidate committed to enforcing U.S. immigration laws.

In the 2024 presidential election, other simmering issues will be hotly debated – abortion, the economy, crime, war in the Ukraine and the Middle East – but nothing will be more important than restoring U.S. sovereignty.

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

Defend Borders or Close West Point and Annapolis

Feinstein Replacement Assures 2024 Chaos

By Joe Guzzardi

During much of Dianne Feinstein’s 20 years in the U.S. Senate, I lived in California and wrote political commentary for two San Joaquin Valley dailies. Regardless of my topic, out of professional curiosity, I asked my subjects’ off-the-record opinion about the California governor and their local congressional representatives. When I inquired about Feinstein, most replied with indifference. At no point did I sense voter enthusiasm about Feinstein, or detect the feeling that, in their minds, her re-election was paramount to California’s well-being.

Yet, after Republican Sen. Pete Wilson resigned in 1991 to run for governor, Feinstein won the 1992 special election, and was then re-elected five times – 1994, 2000, 2006, 2012 and 2018, a remarkable achievement. Prior to her Senate success, Feinstein came in third in the 1975 San Francisco mayoral election to winner George Moscone, and lost the 1990 gubernatorial general election to Wilson. As so often happens in politics, death, retirement and shifting winds played a major role in Feinstein’s ascendancy.

Elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1969, Feinstein served as the board’s president in 1978, during which time Mayor George Moscone and City Supervisor Harvey Milk were assassinated. Feinstein succeeded Moscone as mayor, and Wilson’s decision to give up his Senate seat opened up national office opportunities for Feinstein which she capitalized on. When fellow Democrat Alan Cranston retired in 1993, Feinstein became California’s senior senator.

Once an established incumbent, and even though California was not yet the solidly blue state it is today – Republican Wilson was, after all, just a few years removed from his governorship – Feinstein coasted. Feinstein’s uninspiring GOP challengers, Tom Campbell, Dick Mountjoy and Elizabeth Emken eased her path.

As Feinstein’s Senate seniority advanced, she got plum assignments, including with the Senate Rules Committee. Feinstein also chaired the Select Committee on Intelligence, an ironic appointment since, as later discovered, she was chauffeured by a Chinese operative that the FBI suspected of gathering government secrets before he absconded back to China.

Considered a moderate when she arrived in Washington, Feinstein quickly adopted the established Democratic positions especially on an issue that roiled Congress from her career’s inception to its end: immigration.

In the early 1990s, at a press conference on the California-Mexico border, Feinstein said that illegal immigration was too costly to allow it to continue. In California alone, Feinstein continued, taxpayers spent $2 billion annually on illegal immigration. Feinstein added that illegal immigration involved a battle for “space” between the aliens and citizens – space for jobs, for classroom seats and for housing. More immigration means less space for citizens, said Feinstein.

Thirty years later, however, Feinstein joined the Senate’s open borders faction. Over her three decades in the Upper Chamber, Feinstein’s immigration grade dropped from C to D.

Unbeknownst to the public, Feinstein also championed private immigration bills. She introduced more bills that protected illegal immigrants from deportation than any other legislator. Her singular attempts to circumvent immigration laws to provide for her special causes mostly involved tourist visa overstays. Some remained unlawfully present for as long as 17 years after their visas expired, hardly compelling circumstances that require Senate intervention.

On October 2, Gov. Gavin Newsom named EMILY’s List President Laphonza Butler to fill the remaining 15 months of Feinstein’s term. EMILY’s List works to elect female Democrats who support abortion rights. Per an August Federal Election Commission filing, Butler was a Maryland resident. Butler was then quickly sworn into office by Vice President Kamala Harris, for whom Butler had worked on Harris’ failed 2020 presidential campaign.

What happens next in the post-Feinstein era is uncertain. A special election involving Butler is probable, but no one knows whether the appointee or any of the other declared candidates for the full six-year term will run. Announced candidates Reps. Barbara Lee, Adam Schiff and Katie Porter are evaluating their decisions vis-à-vis the special election.

Despite California’s whopping $32 billion budget deficit, its affordable housing crisis, a soaring homeless population, endemic smash-and-grab crime and a collapsed education system, whoever permanently replaces Feinstein will vote straight “yea” on immigration expansion bills – as if more immigration is the solution to California’s monumental problems. Lee, Schiff and Porter have F- immigration grades from NumbersUSA.

Feinstein is gone, but her age, 90, and her vast $64 million wealth, exclusive of prime real estate holdings, raise questions about imposing term limits, and whether millionaires married to billionaires can fairly represent the average citizen. Feinstein commuted from San Francisco to D.C. on her private $6 million Gulfstream G650 jet. Term limits and personal wealth should but will never be considered as candidacy restrictions. Still, Feinstein’s congressional pro-immigration allies can take comfort that her replacement will carry on with the departed senator’s sovereignty-eroding immigration expansion legacy.

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

Feinstein Replacement Assures 2024 Chaos

McCarthy Misses The Big Immigration Picture On Impeachment

By Joe Guzzardi

For all of Kevin McCarthy’s bluster about his impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden’s corrupt finances, skeptics have deep doubts about the House Speaker’s priorities.

The Biden family’s financial double-dealing is small potatoes compared to the nation’s lost sovereignty that the administration’s open border agenda promotes. While the evidence that Oversight Committee Chair James Comer uncovered reveals a well-established pattern of the Biden family’s dubious dealings, McCarthy has said little about the more compelling border disaster.

Biden’s blatant refusal to enforce even to the minimum extent the nation’s immigration laws is easily proven. This flagrant abdication of duty to enforce laws for the security and safety of U.S. citizens and sovereignty of the country represents a series of impeachable offenses. McCarthy, Comer, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, et al, don’t have to subpoena bank records, review the 5,400 emails that Biden wrote under his pseudonyms Robert Peters, Robin Ware and JRB Ware. House leadership simply has to visit the border to see that Biden has aided, abetted, facilitated, orchestrated and promoted illegal immigration, crimes for which he should be removed from office.

The latest Customs and Border Protection (CBP) stats are shocking, even for people who follow invasion data regularly. A total of 35,000 illegal aliens entered the U.S. for the weekend beginning Friday, September 15 and ending Monday, September 18, and CBP processed most of them. More accurately, CBP released 35,000 unvetted aliens into the interior. Previous surges included convicted criminals and possible terrorists on the FBI watch list.

In this unending human flow across the border, thanks to the Biden administration, consider also the doomed migrants who never reach their intended destinations. Their deaths are true human tragedies. The Wall Street Journal reported in March that in FY 2022 U.S. authorities discovered 890 bodies at the Southwest border, while hundreds of migrants are considered missing. Speculation is that somewhere in the border’s broad, rugged terrain, thousands more corpses lie undiscovered.

Human trafficking is a $150 billion industry, and traffickers have taken advantage of Biden’s inexcusable refusal to secure the homeland against foreign invaders who deliver deadly amounts of fentanyl and transport minors predestined for the sex trade or used and mistreated as underage labor. Federal code states that one single person found guilty of a trafficking violation will face a lengthy prison term, “potentially including life imprisonment for conduct involving actual or attempted killing, kidnapping, or aggravated sexual abuse.”

Taken on whole, the administration has, with Biden’s blessing, permitted one immigration crime after another. While Biden’s financial chicanery should lead to jail time, enriching of family won’t destroy the nation. But Biden’s open borders policy has the gravest of consequences – an end to sovereign America.

In a preview of future border-caused fiscal calamities to come for Chicago, Washington, D.C., San Francisco and other municipalities, Biden has brought New York City to its knees. Mayor Eric Adams is begging for a financial bailout to help subsidize the 110,000 migrants who have arrived in the Big Apple since April 2022. Evaluating his plight, Adams, speaking the truest words he’ll ever utter, said: “Never in my life have I had a problem that I did not see an ending to. I don’t see an ending to this. This issue will destroy New York City.”

Adams has correctly summed up the migrant invasion: no ending is in sight for New York or the nation. To offset the city’s projected cost of $12 billion to support aliens, some progressive Democrats propose a 5 percent state tax, the so-called “migrant tax.”

The GOP’s pre-2022 Election Day “Commitment to America” failed to deliver on lofty promises, including a pledge to prevent illegal crossings, stop cartel trafficking, end catch-and-release loopholes and require legal status to get a job. Keeping score, that’s zero for four, a .000 average. Such an across-the-board GOP failure diminishes confidence in the party and puts Speaker McCarthy on shaky ground when he’s trying to sell his point of view, in this case that Biden’s financial hanky-panky is more important than vanished borders.

If voters were asked which of the two crimes they consider more egregious, Biden’s open borders – the consequences of which are ruining their communities – or the money laundering and influence peddling, the result would be a landslide. The outcome: Impeach Biden now before he can do more harm to American sovereignty.

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

McCarthy Misses The Big Immigration Picture On Impeachment

The Disease That Killed Roger Maris; September Is Lymphoma Awarness Month

By Joe Guzzardi

During the waning weeks of September 1961, New York Yankees right fielder Roger Maris pulled away from teammate Mickey Mantle in the summer-long race to win the American League home run title.

The tension surrounding their pursuit to break Babe Ruth’s 60 homers in a single season record intensified when Commissioner Ford Frick decreed that to be recognized as legitimate, the M&M boys would have to hit number 61 within 154 games, the season’s length during the Big Bam’s career. But after 154 games, to the delight of his many detractors who thought Maris a colorless, unworthy journeyman who never even hit .300, he had only 59 round-trippers. Number 61 came on October 1 in the season’s finale at Yankee Stadium. 

A befuddled, irked Maris later asked: “When they say 154 games, which 154 games are they talking about? The first 154, the middle 154, the last 154? If it’s the first, then I’d still have tied Ruth, because I didn’t hit my first homer until the 11th game. If it was the last 154 or the middle 154, then I’d have broken it anyway.”

Maris comes to mind because September is designated Leukemia and Lymphoma Awareness Month by the American Cancer Society. At age 51, the lymphoma scourge took Maris’ life.

Despite setting a new single-season home run record, and winning two back-to-back Most Valuable Player awards, Maris’ six-year tenure with the Yankees from 1960 to 1966 was doomed. The press was unrelentingly critical, and its pro-Ruth and pro-Mantle stories, coupled with its anti-Maris news, influenced fans who showered boos on the player Yankee managers Casey Stengel and Ralph Houk admired for his five-tool skills. Roger could, insisted the two World Series’ champion managers, hit, hit for power, run, field and throw. Looking back on his 1961 home run season, Maris said that “it wasn’t worth the aggravation. I had so many people on my tail. People hated me for breaking Ruth’s record – especially the press.”

Maris’ critics could not have misjudged his character more completely. In his book “You’re Missin’ a Great Game,” Hall of Fame manager Whitey Herzog wrote about the winter of 1961 to 62 when he was building with his own hands a home in Kansas City. Maris, just coming off two consecutive MVPs seasons, including one in which he was the most famous man in the sports world, volunteered to help. Every frigid morning, at 7:30 sharp, Maris reported to work, packing his lunch pail, ready to pound nails.

As a sidebar to the then-raging debate about whether Ruth or Maris should be designated as the true home run king, the Society for American Baseball Research historian Brian Marshall calculated that the variable between Ruth’s 1927 record and Maris’ in 1961 isn’t the additional eight games played but the batters’ total plate appearances. Marshall’s conclusion: it may appear to be a “no-brainer that Maris would have more opportunity [he played more games] to accomplish his feat than Ruth did to accomplish his. The fact is that Maris actually had less opportunity on a per game basis [fewer plate appearances.]”

In December 1966, the ingrate Yankees who insisted Roger play while injured, essentially gave Maris away to the St. Louis Cardinals in exchange for third baseman Charlie Smith. In his two years with the Yankees, 1967 to 1968, Smith hit .224. Maris, on the other hand, led the Cardinals to two National League pennants during the same period.

Because of Maris’ hostile relationship with the Yankees and its fans, and despite new owner George Steinbrenner’s pleading, the home run king boycotted the Old Timers’ Games for a decade. Then, in 1978, without advance notice, Maris appeared to help raise the Yankees’ 1977 American league pennant. Introduced by Mantle, Maris received an unexpectedly warm reception.

Maris’ post-retirement years found him hanging out with old Yankees and Cardinals friends, and successfully managing a central Florida Anheuser-Busch distributorship, a gift from Cardinals owner Gussie Busch. Around Thanksgiving 1983, Maris began to suffer from headaches which continued into early 1984. At first, Maris ignored them. But, when he experienced intermittent difficulty breathing and developed numerous lumps over his body, he sought medical attention. Maris had lymphoma. His original diagnosis offered hope for a full recovery. After immediately beginning chemotherapy, Maris was optimistic. As the cancer progressed, however, Maris to no avail visited cancer specialists at New York’s Mt. Sinai Hospital and Houston’s Anderson Hospital and Tumor Institute. On December 14, 1985, Maris passed.

After Maris’ funeral in Fargo, North Dakota, St. Patrick’s Cathedral held a memorial service two days before Christmas. At the service’s end, Cardinal John Joseph O’Connor, looking at Maris’ grandchildren, said:

“In something somewhat unusual for this great cathedral, I’m going to ask those in attendance to give us one last burst of applause for your grandfather so that you can get some understanding about how New York truly felt about him, and get some idea of the cheers that used to fill the great Yankee Stadium.”

With that, everyone, including attendee President Richard Nixon, began to applaud, politely at first. Then, on their feet and in tears, loud chants of “RO-GER, RO-GER” filled St. Patrick’s. A long-overdue and fitting tribute to Maris, an outstanding but under-appreciated baseball hero, had finally been paid in full.

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

The Disease That Killed Roger Maris; September Is Lymphoma Awarness Month The Disease That Killed Roger Maris; September Is Lymphoma Awarness Month

GOP Has Rare Opportunity to Secure Border

By Joe Guzzardi

Congress is back from its August recess, the weeks-long period away from its always-contentious, mostly unproductive business. The House and the Senate have less than three weeks until the Sep. 30 deadline to pass a federal budget. On Oct. 1, a new fiscal year begins. If lawmakers cannot push through 11 out of 12 separate spending bills, after passing just one before they left Washington, the nation will face a government shutdown.

With time short for congressional action, the more likely outcome, albeit a temporary one, is that lawmakers could pass a Continuing Resolution which would avert a shutdown and fund the government at its current levels until a mutually agreed upon date.

Some in the GOP caucus view shutdown threats, which would adversely affect only a small percentage of the population, as foolish saber-rattling. They suggest that a more urgent problem than a government services’ pause is the nation’s $2 trillion deficit and $33 trillion national debt. Writing in “City Journal,” Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Nicole Gelinas in her article, “The Permanent Crisis Economy,” observed:

“… (T)hrough the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations, Congress has approved record levels of deficit spending, paid not through tax collections but via Treasury debt. In 2007, the government owed $8.6 trillion in today’s dollars. As of the end of 2022, it owed more than triple that, $26.9 trillion, including $4.8 trillion in pandemic-era borrowing. Much of this was printed by the Fed: its balance sheet went from $1.3 trillion just before the financial crisis to a high of $8.9 trillion in 2022, as it conjured zeros on computer screens to buy Treasury debt, thus financing federal deficits.”

While Republicans are intent on cutting spending, a Continuing Resolution (CR) would also provide Congress with an opportunity to rein in the raging, unlawful border crisis, which is overwhelming major cities including New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Denver, as well as thousands of smaller towns. New York Mayor Eric Adams declared that the illegal alien surge into his city has the potential to destroy it. Adams’ prediction is dramatic, but spot on. The city, inconveniencing and displacing thousands of New York taxpayers who fund the invasion, is housing about 60,000 aliens in 200 sites, including more than 140 hotels.

At a press conference, the mayor did the math for his incredulous audience: “For each family seeking asylum through the city’s care, we spend an average of $383 per night to provide shelter, food, medical care and social services. With more than 57,300 individuals currently in our care, on an average night, it amounts to $9.8 million a day, almost $300 million a month, and nearly $3.6 billion a year.” Adams ominously added that these costs represent the floor, not the ceiling of potentially higher costs. New York’s Democratic congressional caucus that includes the powerful Sen. Majority leader Chuck Schumer, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries have shown zero interest in border enforcement which would ease the ever-mounting pressure on Adams. Congressional Democrats to Adams: “Good luck. You’re on your own.”

For persons serious about ending the border crisis, now is the hour to use the upcoming spending battle to create meaningful border security and pro-American immigration reform. In May, the House passed H.R. 2, the Secure Border Act of 2023, which would end many of the immigration abuses that global migrants have unsurprisingly taken advantage of and that the Biden administration has fully encouraged.

Among many other positives, the bill would close asylum loopholes – the invasion’s main driver – and would mandate E-Verify which would protect American jobs. Other enforcement features include ending catch-and-release and parole abuse, while deporting visa overstays and tightening lax family unit and unaccompanied minors’ entry guidelines. H.R. 2’s most significant provisions, restoring credibility to asylum petitions and cutting the jobs’ magnet through E-Verify, would end the pull enticement that lures migrants.

The House, which holds the purse strings of Congress, has an opportunity to end the border insanity if it attaches H.R. 2 to the must-pass CR. “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop,” said Herbert Stein, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. The border calamity has already lasted more than two years, way too long. Assuming the GOP can get its act together, H.R. 2 can be the key to ending the sovereignty-destroying invasion.

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

GOP Has Rare Opportunity to Secure Border

Winningest Jewish Pitcher Ken Holtzman, A Rosh Hashana Baseball Story

By Joe Guzzardi

When the Chicago Cubs called up Ken Holtzman from the Rookie Pioneer League in 1965, some within the organization predicted that the lefty flamethrower would be the next Sandy Koufax. Both were tall, lean, Jewish flamethrowers.

Holtzman had an outstanding 17-year-long career that included two stints with the Cubs, and one go-around each with the Oakland Athletics, the Baltimore Orioles and the New York Yankees. During his time on the slab with the A’s, Holtzman peaked. From 1972 through 1975, Holtzman won 19, 21, 18 and 19 games. In the World Series, when the chips were down, Holtzman excelled on the mound and with the lumber. Against the Hall of Fame-stacked, powerful Cincinnati Reds — Pete Rose, Johnny Bench, Joe Morgan and Tony Perez — Holtzman won the 1972 World Series opener, and would eventually record a 4–1, 2.55 ERA during the five fall classics he participated in. As if to mock the as-yet-unheard-of universal designated hitter, Holtzman had a career World Series .333 batting average that included two doubles.

Upon joining the Cubs, Holtzman soon became the rotations go-to guy. In 1966, in his first-ever major league start against the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Don Drysdale, Holtzman earned a 2–0 victory. One highlight that year was a late-season matchup between Holtzman and his boyhood idol, and the hurler he had been compared to, Koufax. The matchup took place at Wrigley Field on Sept. 25. The 24th was Yom Kippur, and neither Holtzman nor Koufax was in uniform; both were observing the Jewish Holy Day.

The Cubs scored two runs in the first inning against Koufax, all the support Holtzman needed. He entered the ninth inning with a no-hitter before giving up two harmless singles. Holtzman got the complete-game 2–0 win, striking out eight. In 1969, Holtzman notched his first no-hitter, 2–0 against the Atlanta Braves, and 318-game winner-to-be Joe Niekro. Holtzman’s masterpiece included a peculiar footnote — he didn’t strike out a single batter. Since 1901, a no-hitter without a strike out had happened only four times. With today’s 100-pitch limit, the baseball oddity will never happen again. Holtzman pitched his second no-hitter against the Reds in 1971.

After Cubs manager Leo Durocher directed anti-Semitic slurs at Holtzman, the pitcher demanded a trade, a fortuitous development for the lefty. In exchange for outstanding Cubs outfielder Rick Monday, an Arizona State All-American, Holtzman went to the A’s, a team on the cusp of winning three consecutive World Series championships. One of Holtzman’s new teammates was Mike Epstein, a one-time University of California fullback and defensive tackle. The irreverent, bombastic A’s nicknamed Holtzman and Epstein, “Jew” and “Superjew.” Neither took offense at the crude clubhouse labels.

On Sept. 5, 1972, during an off day in Chicago, when news reached Holtzman that Palestinian terrorists took 11 Israeli Olympic athletes hostage, and killed two, he sought out Epstein. They walked the streets, comforting each other, wondering what the Israelis had done to precipitate such hate, and why the Munich Massacre happened. Explaining their long walk on Chicago’s empty streets, Epstein who had once drawn the Star of David on his mitt, said to a Pittsburgh Press reporter: “I put on tefillin at different shuls in different cities. I was Bar Mitzvahed. I can read Hebrew. I’m a Jew.” The next day, in remembrance of the deceased, Holtzman and Epstein donned black arm bands on their jerseys’ sleeves, and kept them on through the playoffs. Remembered Epstein: “It was an emotional period. I’m glad we did something.”

After Epstein went hitless in the 1972 World Series, A’s owner Charles O. Finley dumped him and his 26 home runs to the Texas Rangers. Two years later, Epstein ended his nine-year career with the California Angels where he hit .206. Out of baseball, he began a successful batting school on the West Coast. Now retired, Epstein is 80.

Holtzman never achieved the Koufax-like Hall of Fame success that some had predicted for him. But he was elected to the 1972 and 1973 American League All-Star games. Holtzman finished his career with a record of 174–150, and a 3.49 ERA. He won nine more games in his career than Sandy Koufax’s 165 total which made Holtzman history’s winningest Jewish pitcher. In 2007, Holtzman briefly returned to baseball when he managed the Israel Baseball League’s Petach Tikva Pioneers. His experience with the league was an unhappy one, and he left the team before the season ended. Holtzman, now 77, is retired and lives outside St. Louis, his birthplace.

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

Winningest Jewish Pitcher Ken Holtzman, A Rosh Hashana Baseball Story

Staten Islanders Protest Mayor And Invasion

By Joe Guzzardi

Last October, Staten Island Borough President Vito Fossella, referring to the migrant rush, said that the crisis is “spinning out of control.” A few days later, New York City Mayor Eric Adams acknowledged that the steady migrant stream into the city’s five boroughs represented “a state of emergency.”

Objecting to Adams’ relocating migrants originally bussed to Manhattan to the four other boroughs, Fossella demanded to know why the people of Staten Island are forced to deal with an issue that they did not create, and they don’t want in their backyards, a question that’s resonated in many major cities unsuccessfully trying to cope with thousands of needy asylum seekers.

Almost a year has passed since Fossella pleaded for common sense on a federal issue that requires a federal solution. Instead, the feds haven’t lifted a finger to stop migrant entry at the border, the obvious first step toward a solution. As Fossella predicted, Staten Island continues to face an ongoing crisis that stems directly from excessive federal government demands to provide for migrants. Sometimes referred to as New York’s “forgotten borough,” residents are fed up.

In recent weeks, four large-scale protests have been formed to rail against the conversion of the former St. John Villa Academy into a 300-bed facility to house and feed migrants. Hundreds of protestors held signs that objected to unvetted migrants being relocated in their community. Other signs expressed safety concerns, a reasonable worry. Legal wrangling about using the former school as migrant shelter has been ongoing. In late August, Staten Island Supreme Court Judge Wayne Ozzi temporarily banned housing migrants at the former school. But within a few hours, Brooklyn Supreme Court Appellate Division Justice Carl Landicino overturned Judge Ozzi’s decision.

Curtis Sliwa, former NYC mayoral candidate, Guardian Angels’ founder and staunch supporter of besieged Staten Island residents, promised to organize closures of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, the Goethals Bridge, the Bayonne Bridge and the Outerbridge Crossing which would cut off access to Staten Island from vehicles transporting aliens from Manhattan. Sliwa has pledged to run against Adams again in 2025 when conditions might be favorable for him. In 2021, only 20.5 percent of 5.6 million registered voters turned out in the mayoral election. Adams won 67 percent of the vote, and Sliwa won 27 percent. Assuming anger over Adams’ horrible management of the migrant increases, the only direction it can head, Sliwa could surprise.

Adams blames everyone but himself for New York’s steady erosion. At his September press conference, Adams admitted that the migrant problem will “destroy” New York, ominously adding that he doesn’t “see an ending to this.” Then, Adams correctly blamed President Biden, and then, preposterously, condemned Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, calling him “a madman.” Since Biden was installed in the White House, he has opened the U.S. borders to more than 8 million illegal aliens. Since 2022, Texas has bussed a piddling 13,000 of them to New York City, where leadership there years ago avowed its “right to shelter.”

Directly under Adams’ nose, a migrant crime wave is well underway. At the Roosevelt Hotel, a former landmark built in 1922 to honor President Teddy Roosevelt, but today a hellhole where migrants live, police have arrested 41 aliens, most for domestic violence, assault and child endangerment. District Attorney Alvin Bragg refuses to prosecute.

Protests like Staten Island’s, and previous ones in Chicago, Massachusetts and other places nationwide, are just the beginning. Voters don’t want an invasion, and they certainly don’t want to subsidize one. Winter months are coming, and for migrants, sleeping on the street will be less of an option. Biden has 15 more months in office, hundreds of thousands more migrants are on the way.

Time for Adams, and other migrant-inundated state and city officials, to shut down the invasion and cancel sanctuary status, which never appeared on an official public ballot to begin with! Take a page from Sliwa’s game plan; keep aliens out before conditions get worse than they already are.

Joe Guzzardi is a Project for Immigration Reform analyst. Contact him at jguzzardi@ifspp.org.

Staten Islanders Protest Mayor And Invasion

High-Earning Californians Moving Out

By Joe Guzzardi

After decades of dramatic population increases, California’s residency totals have stabilized, although not in the manner that advocates had hoped for. Radical policies embraced in Sacramento, and by other major municipalities including Los Angeles and San Francisco, have accelerated residents’ departure. Those still stuck behind are left to cope with rising crime, homelessness and governance’s indifference to taxpayers’ legitimate grievances.

Under Gov. Gavin Newsom’s woke, misguided leadership, district attorneys disinclined to prosecute have passively looked on as California’s violent crime rate increased by 6 percent, from 2020 to 2021. During the same period, aggravated assaults jumped by 8.9 percent, and homicides and rape increased by 7.7 percent and 7.9 percent, respectively.

Criminals are so fearless and authorities so inert that the media has coined a new phrase to describe hoodlums’ brazen behavior. “Smash-and-grab” refers to mobs of hooded thieves that break into upscale department stores, smash display cases and grab expensive merchandise for resale on street corners or on the Internet. Homelessness, a problem that Newsom, tongue-in-cheek, said he “owns,” is a major headache for California’s big city dwellers.

California was once a prime destination for individuals who wanted to bask in the Golden State’s many advantages – weather, good middle-class jobs and a thriving economy. Today, job-seekers are headed elsewhere. From 1900 through 1990, California’s population increased 38 percent on average per decade. In 1900, California’s population was 1.5 million; in 1990, the total population was 30 million, and just a tick below 40 million in 2023. California’s Department of Finance, the state’s official demographer, noted that in its most recent count, 46 of the state’s 58 counties, including the three most populous – Los Angeles, San Diego and Orange – lost population.

Californians’ exodus to other states marks the beginning of residents’ flight away from what they increasingly view as a dysfunctional place to live. The American Community Survey found that, from 2010 through 2021, about 7.7 million people moved from California to other states, while only 5.8 million people moved to California from other parts of the country. The California Department of Finance estimates that the state has lost residents to other states every year since 2000. Over the past few years, the movement out of the state has accelerated with a record net outflow of 407,000 from July 2021 to July 2022.

In 2021, more than 360,000 people left California to relocate in Texas, Arizona and Washington. Some even moved to Mexico to avoid the 2021 to 2022 inflation surge, as Mexico is more affordable to live in than many U.S. destinations. Between April 2020 and July 2022, the state’s population dropped by more than 500,000 people, a trend demographers refer to as net interstate migration. Among the departing Californians are young adults who have earned a bachelor’s degree or higher, a significant trend because historically the Golden State was a destination for aspiring college-educated persons at the outset of their careers. Also abandoning California in large numbers are high-income households, defined as earning incomes of $137,500 or more for a family of four.

If interstate migration patterns continue, California could experience sustained population losses for years to come. Eventually, assuming the migration pattern continues, California will be transformed from vibrant and productive to government benefit-dependent.

Because of the state’s high taxes and complex regulatory environment, businesses also left the state. Between 2020 and 2023, about 65 corporations with 100 or more employees left California. Many companies are household names like McAfee, Oracle, Chevron, Charles Schwab and Tesla.

Incoming population – of which the aggregate total offsets the outgoing population – is in large part illegal immigrants, a variable that the open Southwest border has exacerbated. Newsom, in an interview with ABC News, said that in the post-Title 42 era, the Biden administration is sending “more and more” migrants to California which could, in his word, “break” the state.

California is already broke; its $31.5 million budget deficit bodes poorly for residents who depend on the state for child care, transportation and other publicly funded services, areas targeted for deep cuts. The state budget is highly dependent on income taxes paid by its highest earners – people who have fled – and is therefore subject to the ebbs and flows of capital gains from investments and the hefty bonuses paid to executives.

Incredibly, against the backdrop of Californians voting with their feet, and exiting in droves, Newsom’s name is bandied about as a possible 2024 presidential candidate should Biden either be forced to retire or be dumped. Other scenarios are possible. Boot Vice President Kamala Harris off the 2024 ticket, replace her with Newsom, and in a smoke-filled backroom prearranged deal, Biden retires shortly after Inauguration Day. In February 2025, Gavin Newsom, having never campaigned or received a single vote, would become the U.S. president.

On the surface, such a bizarre set-up appears farfetched. But in today’s political climate, anything goes – absolutely anything – including elevating to the White House a governor who has spawned California’s deep and potentially irreversible decline.

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Joe Guzzardi is a Project for Immigration Reform analyst. Contact him at jguzzardi@ifspp.org.

High-Earning Californians Moving Out

High-Earning Californians Moving Out