Category: Joe Guzzardi

America Competes Act Another Attack On American Workers

By Joe Guzzardi

Nothing stops the push by Congress for more immigration – not 9/11, not the mortgage meltdown and Wall Street crisis, not dismal Bureau of Labor Statistics job reports and not COVID-19. Despite the fact that about 1 million new lawful permanent residents get work authorization each year, that about 750,000 guest workers arrive annually in a typical year and that dozens of types of nonimmigrant visas include employment permission, Congress is never satisfied.
 
Congress insists, predictably and tediously, that without more foreign-born labor, the economy will collapse and small businesses will vanish. These baseless claims, consistently proven false, are repeated year after year after year.
 
Example: In 2017, mostly at the horse racing industry’s behest, the Senate introduced the Save our Small and Seasonal Businesses Act, and the House introduced companion legislation, Strengthen Employment and Seasonal Opportunities Now Act. The bills, with bipartisan support, predicted that without more H-2B nonagricultural visas, horse racing, as fans know the “Sport of Kings,” might become extinct. But, four years later, the Kentucky Derby and smaller races at other nationwide tracks continue to draw large, revenue-generating crowds.

Example: Last year, U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), Chair of the House Subcommittee on Immigration and Citizenship and immigration lawyer, introduced the Let Immigrants Kick Start Employment Act that would create a new temporary visa for founders of start-up ventures. In her press release, Lofgren said that more immigration leads to more American jobs, an often-made, but misleading claim. Although Lofgren’s bill went nowhere, Silicon Valley recorded record profits in 2021, and The New York Timespredicted that titans Google, Apple, Microsoft and other tech giants will be rolling in dough for years to come. From its July 2021 story: “The combined stock market valuation of Apple, Alphabet, Nvidia, Tesla, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook increased by about 70 percent to more than $10 trillion. That is roughly the size of the entire U.S. stock market in 2002. Apple alone has enough cash in its coffers to give $600 to every person in the United States.”
 
The latest assault on American workers is an immigration train wreck coyly called the America COMPETES Act of 2022. Boiled down to the bill’s most harmful elements, the America COMPETES Act would:
 

1. Create a W nonimmigrant visa program for foreign investors of start-ups and entrepreneurs, their families and so-called but undefined essential foreign workers who work for them, also allowing their family members to receive work permits.
2. Create a one-year path to an unlimited number of Green Cards for any W visa holder who meets certain investment and ownership stake requirements.
3. Create an unlimited number of Green Cards for foreign citizens who hold a doctoral degree from a U.S. institution of higher learning or an equivalent degree from a foreign university.
4. Create a five-year program that creates 5,000 Special Immigrant Visas (SIV) yearly for Hong Kong residents, amounting to an additional 25,000 Green Cards over the five-year period.
5. Authorize an unlimited refugee/asylee program for certain Hong Kong residents.
6. Change existing law to treat Hong Kong as a separate state from China in determining per-country limits for existing Green Card categories.
7. Grant Temporary Protected Status with work permission for Hong Kong residents currently in the U.S., regardless of their existing immigration status which may include unlawfully present status.

 
Under the guise of promoting American innovation, the act’s hodgepodge of vague language makes almost anything possible. One thing is certain – the America COMPETES Act will massively increase legal immigration, flood the labor market, make job searches for Americans in all sectors more difficult, and have an adverse effect on recent U.S. college graduates hoping to begin their careers.
 
The America COMPETES Act intentionally harms U.S. citizens, but will be a bonanza for arriving foreign nationals, employers addicted to cheap labor and Silicon Valley multimillionaires. No greater gap exists between voters and Congress than on immigration policy. The thoroughly awful, destructive America COMPETES Act is one of the most powerful examples of why the immigration chasm is so wide.
 
 
A PFIR analyst, Joe Guzzardi writes about immigration issues and impacts. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org and joeguzzardi.substack.com.

America Competes Act Another Attack On American Workers

Teenage Girl Whiffs Ruth, Gehrig, Fact Or Fiction?

By Joe Guzzardi
 

More than 80 years ago, 17-year-old lefty sidewinder and distaff Jackie Mitchell struck out on seven pitches baseball’s powerful sluggers, the New York Yankees’ Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. Historians rank Ruth and Gehrig as baseball’s most fearsome back-to-back slugging tandem. On April 2, 1931, the impossible-to-believe feat, a teenage girl whiffing the two home run bashers, happened in front of 4,000 incredulous fans. The following day, TheNew York Times in its headline story “Ruth and Gehrig Struck Out by Girl Pitcher” confirmed the accomplishment of Mitchell from the minor league Chattanooga Lookouts.

Eight decades later, the time has again come to determine whether Ruth and Gehrig were part of a hoax that the Lookouts owner and notorious prankster Joe Engel arranged—he had once traded a player for a turkey, and then served the carved-up bird to local sportswriters – or whether Mitchell had legitimately whiffed the two greats.

Readers, with history’s help, can make their own decision. Ordinarily, a 17-year-old, female or male, would be impossibly overmatched against Ruth and Gehrig. To be sure, Ruth, age 37, was approaching his career’s end. Still, Ruth hit 49 homers the previous season and Gehrig, 41. But Mitchell had impressive credentials of her own. She was an all-around athlete who starred in basketball in the winter, and excelled at baseball in the spring. More than anything, however, Mitchell learned about pitching from her neighbor, Hall of Fame hurler Dazzy Vance – called Dazzy because his opponents said that his pitches dazzled them.

Vance had developed a remarkable curriculum vitae of his own. Pitching for the consistently terrible Brooklyn Robins, Vance led the National League in strikeouts for seven consecutive seasons, 1922 to 1928, and won 20 games three times. Vance taught Mitchell how to throw the drop ball, now called a sinker.

The Yankees were traveling north for their Opening Day game against the Red Sox, and had scheduled two exhibition games against the Lookouts. With Mitchell under contract, and with game one – hint, hint – an April 1 Fools Day contest rained out, the April 2 game began ominously for the Lookouts. Starting pitcher Clyde Barfoot gave up a quick double and a single. Manager Bert Niehoff signaled to the bullpen for portsider Mitchell to face left-handed batting Ruth and Gehrig, the trusted lefty versus lefty pitching strategy at play. Mitchell’s first delivery to Ruth was a ball followed by two swinging strikes, and a called strike three. Ruth threw his bat to the ground in – hint, hint, again – feigned disgust. Gehrig went down even easier than Ruth – three atypically wild swings at Mitchell’s offerings. After Mitchell walked the third slugger in the Yankees’ Murders’ Row line up, Tony Lazzeri, her day was done; the Yankees beat up on the Lookouts, 14-4.

The Times account provides some valuable insight into the goings on. Ruth, the newspaper wrote, “performed his role very ably,” and Gehrig “took three hefty swings as his contribution to the occasion.” Unsurprisingly Mitchell recalls her performance differently. Interviewed in 1987, Mitchell said, “Why, hell, they were trying, damn right.” Then, Mitchell added testily, “Hell, better [unidentified] batters than them couldn’t hit me.”

Readers trying to determine whether young “lipstick wielding” Mitchell, as one account referred to her, struck out Ruth and Gehrig on the up and up should remember that the Bambino was to his fans the consummate pleasure-giver and crowd-pleaser. He joked with them from his right field position, waved greetings as he drove through New York’s streets, visited hospitals spontaneously, signed every shred of paper, programs, baseballs, menus and match book covers put in front of him. Ruth knew that he had nothing to gain if he hit a tape measure 500-foot home run against a teenage girl and local darling. And Gehrig, who wasn’t going to show up Ruth, had nothing to prove either. Baseball loves a good story, and Mitchell’s tale filled the bill.

In 1933, after then-MLB Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis voided Mitchell’s contract, she signed with the House of David barnstorming team. But Mitchell quickly grew tired of its non-baseball antics that included playing games while astride donkeys and retired to join her father’s Chattanooga optometry office.

In the end, no one can dispute that Mitchell faced three Hall of Fame greats – Ruth, Gehrig and Lazzeri – and struck out two of them on seven pitches. No pitcher can say the same, and, best of all, Mitchell’s once-in-a lifetime story is, even if orchestrated, 100 percent verifiable fact.

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

Teenage Girl Whiffs Ruth, Gehrig, Fact Or Fiction?

AOC vs Schumer Election Battle Looming?

By Joe Guzzardi

Two sure signs that the 2022 mid-term campaigning has begun: candidates’ television spots are bombarding viewers, and the Capitol Hill rumor mill is grinding away. One of the most intriguing bits of gossip is that New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may challenge Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer this year, or wait until 2024 to take on the more vulnerable, ineffective Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand.

Ocasio-Cortez versus Schumer would present a fascinating match up, a media dream come true, with the upstart second-term representative having little to lose. First, consider that Ocasio-Cortez has experience in toppling the Democratic establishment. In the 2018 primary, Ocasio-Cortez drubbed 20-year congressional veteran and incumbent Joe Crowley, then the House Democratic Caucus chairman, the fourth ranking Democrat and a favorite to become Speaker.

Ocasio-Cortez, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, won 57 percent of the vote. Her winning campaign four years ago could foreshadow trouble for Schumer as the message she’d send to New Yorkers would highlight the differences between the incumbent and her. Ocasio-Cortez repeatedly said that upset wins like hers represent what happens when people vote… “they had the money, we had people.”

For Ocasio-Cortez, Schumer represents an inviting target, should she choose to seek the Senate. In 2018, she ran as a woman, a young person, a working-class champion, a fresh face, an unabashed liberal and a person of color. Schumer is male, old, elitist and white. Along the campaign trail, Ocasio-Cortez piled up endorsements from national progressive groups that would elude Schumer.

Few in the Senate are more establishment than Schumer, best friend to Wall Street and Silicon Valley. Schumer’s only jobs since he graduated from Harvard Law School have been in government, and he’s become a powerful, but overly familiar, not particularly admired, boring, dour, staid figure in New York politics for nearly 50 years. First in the State Assembly in 1975, the U.S. House from 1991 to 1999, and the U.S. Senate from 1999 through today, Schumer is yesterday’s news.

On Election Day 2022, Schumer will be two weeks shy of 72; Ocasio-Cortez, 33. The woke vote, the 5 million or so New Yorkers between the ages of 18 to 34, and the fed-up vote would go overwhelmingly to Ocasio-Cortez who knows how to reach younger people through social media and her 13 million Twitter followers. Schumer’s Twitter followers, on the other hand, are 40,000.

Schumer’s approval ratings are the second lowest of his senate career, with only 41 percent of his constituents giving him an “excellent” or “good” score, and 29 percent rating him as “poor.” The polling results have more bad news for Schumer. Among Ocasio-Cortez’s key youthful voters, 58 percent said Schumer was doing a “poor” or, at best, “fair” job.

The next move is Ocasio-Cortez’s. She’s been coy about her intentions, and when questioned directly about challenging Schumer, she’s responded evasively. Ocasio-Cortez’s pat answer is that she hasn’t considered a Senate run, but she hasn’t ruled it out either. “We shall see” is her favorite dodge. Much of Ocasio-Cortez’s future may depend on Schumer’s ability to bring home President Biden’s major legislative agenda, currently badly stalled. Whether Schumer retains his seat, or Ocasio-Cortez upends him, the legislative vote tally will be unchanged. Both are reliably left, and can be counted on to vote straight progressive on social issues.

Ocasio-Cortez’s emergence into the national spotlight and her visibility as a viable U.S. Senate candidate show how dramatically New York’s politics have shifted in just two and a half decades. Within living memory, Republican Gov. George Pataki served three consecutive terms, 1995 to 2006, and defeated incumbent Democrat Mario Cuomo to win his first gubernatorial race. Conservative Sen. Alfonse D’Amato preceded Schumer. Gillibrand, when she served in the U.S. House from 2006 to 2008, was a blue dog Democrat who opposed a 2007 state-level proposal to issue driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants and voted for legislation that would withhold federal funds from sanctuary cities harboring illegal aliens. Once the junior senator came under Schumer’s wing, however, she voted the straight Democratic party line on immigration.

Ocasio-Cortez covets higher political office and has demonstrated the wherewithal to achieve her goals. Some analysts speculate that Ocasio-Cortez will skip a Senate run, and make a presidential bid in 2024. A look at the 24 failed 2020 Democratic candidates makes her run appear possible, if not probable.

In politics, the nine months between today and November 8 are an eternity. Among other Democratic failures on crime, education, affordable housing and COVID-19, New York voters may have grown tired of illegal aliens, including underage migrants, being flown, under cover of darkness, from the Southwest border into their state where they will become taxpayers’ burdens.

A change is coming to New York’s U.S. Senate representation. The question that will face voters is whether the change will represent an improvement in their lives or another step backward toward full-on California status.

A PFIR analyst, Joe Guzzardi writes about immigration issues and impacts. Find him at joeguzzardi.substack.com.

AOC vs Schumer Election Battle Looming? AOC vs Schumer Election Battle Looming?

Border Failure Thought Success By Biden Gang

By Joe Guzzardi

Getting a dinner reservation at Per Se, New York’s restaurant of choice for the city’s royalty, is more difficult than entering the U.S. illegally. The wait for Per Se, the Thomas Keller Restaurant Group dining experience, can exceed three months, but border crossers just walk right on in to the U.S.; neither reservations nor identification is required. Actually, Illegal aliens have it better than Per Se diners. Border surgers don’t have to pay a $2,000 tab, including wine and tax, for dinner for two. Just the opposite for aliens. The free ride begins once they step inside the U.S.

To get their new-in-America lives started, the aliens only have to peacefully surrender to immigration border officials. Although the agents are highly trained to defend and protect the U.S. border, the new normal under Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is for aliens to turn themselves in to Customs and Border Protection agents who process and release them into the American interior. Then, they become the responsibility of  federal, state and local taxpayers who foot the bill for a bountiful array of affirmative benefits.

An extraordinary example of how the Biden administration has abdicated its border responsibilities occurred Jan. 22 when federally charted buses dropped off dozens of illegal alien single adult males in Brownsville, Texas, where they were seen getting into taxis headed for the airport to travel to Miami, Atlanta and Houston. No one has the slightest idea who they are. The only certain thing is the taxpayers, who have no vote in federal immigration policy, are funding their trips. In December 2020, agents reported more than 178,000 encounters at the southern border, the highest December on record. Convicted sex offenders and other criminals were among the 2 million worldwide migrants who illegally entered in 2021.

Several think tanks, each doing independent research, calculated that taxpayers subsidize illegal immigrant health care costs annually to the tune of $18.5 billion, and public education, $60 billion. Unaccompanied minors crossing the border in record numbers from Mexico, and the Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, have created a budget-draining cost to public schools in the form of Limited English Proficiency classes the schools are federally mandatedto offer.

Illegal immigration, the unprecedented Biden-style 2022 version, can be analyzed two ways. Beyond the first, the dollar burden on taxpayers, lays the long-term negative consequences to U.S. sovereignty. Some analysts argue that illegal immigration helps the U.S. economy because the migrant workers are motivated and responsive to the country’s always-shifting needs – in agriculture, construction and hospitality. Those who benefit the most from illegal immigration, however, are the cheap labor-addicted employers who hire them, and the aliens who have relocated, often with spouses and children in tow. Except for corporate profiteers, Americans gain little.

The second and much less discussed consequence of illegal immigration is the dissolution of national sovereignty. Arguments about illegal immigration, good or bad, have persisted for decades. But never before has an administration been so brazenly craven in welcoming and catering to aliens. Of the 2 million illegal immigrants who entered last year, 45,000 were clandestinely flown from the border into the interior with some using their arrest warrants as identification to board commercial aircraft.

Mayorkas openly admits that his agency has “fundamentally changed,” meaning that he’s gutted Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and proudly eliminated worksite enforcement. Even though only Congress can make immigration law, Mayorkas also boasted that in the Biden administration illegal presence is no longer considered a criminal offense.

Texas U.S. Representatives Chip Roy and Michael Cloud have called for Mayorkas’ immediate impeachment. Roy and Cloud allege that Mayorkas has violated many laws in letter and spirit, and he has “undermined the rule of law, violated the Constitution, and placed the lives and inalienable rights of Americans in danger.”

Because Biden and his administration view the border calamity as a thundering success, Mayorkas may remain in office for as long as the president is in office, something that sovereign America cannot withstand if the historic nation is to survive. Mayorkas’ impeachment is the best solution.

Joe Guzzardi is a PFIR analyst who writes about immigration issues and impacts. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org.

Border Failure Thought Success By Biden Gang

Who Needs Congress? D.C.’s New Normal

By Joe Guzzardi

In a late Friday afternoon announcement, the Department of Homeland Security expanded the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, STEM, Optional Practical Training, STEM OPT. Now, F-1 student visa OPT candidates can have degrees in bioenergy, general forestry, forest resources production and management, human-centered technology design, cloud computing, anthrozoology, climate science, earth systems science, economics and computer science, environmental geosciences, geobiology, geography and environmental studies, mathematical economics, mathematics, atmospheric and oceanic science, general data science, general data analytics, business analytics, data visualization, financial analytics, other data analytics, industrial and organizational psychology, and social sciences, research methodology, and quantitative methods. The complete 22-career long list is intended to give readers the full scope of its dire consequences to U.S. students and professionals, not to bog them down.

DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas issued a press release and posted a notice in the Federal Register, but the news barely made a blip in the media or even on business channels. STEM OPT’s expansion, however, is significant since the thousands of new foreign-born workers entering the labor pool will adversely affect employed U.S. tech workers or recent U.S. STEM graduates whose prospective careers could be jeopardized.

“Practical training” is a purposely deceptive phrase; in reality, “training,” defined in real terms, means work authorization, a benefit that wasn’t included for F-1 student visas in the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act. Students were expected to return home when they completed their courses of study. In a major and legally questionable departure from the INA, 70 years later, the biggest guest worker program is the F-1 student visa holder.

Joining DHS in making job searches harder for young Americans, the State Department also did its hurtful best. State doubled the time period for J-1 visa travelers, allegedly in the U.S. on a cultural exchange visit, from 18 to 36 months. Investigative journalists have extensively reported that J-1 visa holders, far from participating in cultural exchange, are often employed at jobs Americans will do. The visa is used to import workers whose professions range from au pair to medical doctor.

DHS’ unexpected proclamation offers insight into how today’s federal government works: wealthy elitists team up with high-ranking administration officials at exclusive functions, then lobby for special considerations that will benefit them while falsely claiming America will be the winner. Finally, the insiders, operating in secret, do an end run around Congress to put their destructive policies into place without the appropriate congressional committee debate or vote.

In 2008, OPT mushroomed from a one-year program that took effect after students graduated to 29 months. During a Georgetown cocktail party, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates complained to then-Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff that Congress’ refusal to authorize more H-1B visas above the existing cap impaired Silicon Valley’s ability to maximize its profits. At that time, 65,000 new H-1B visas were available, with an additional 20,000 visas provided to holders of U.S. university-earned master’s degrees or higher. In 2015, the Obama administration, again without congressional approval, increased the OPT F-1 visa overstay authorization period to 36 months.

Rich, powerful and well-connected Gates and Chertoff proved to be a combination that, when they set out to achieve their mutual goal to provide Silicon Valley with more cheap labor, left U.S. tech workers out in the cold. Then-President George W. Bush, an immigration advocate, could have interceded on behalf of Americans, but chose not to.

That’s the new Washington, D.C. normal – agencies make and enforce regulations as law without congressional approval, and the administration ignores the unlawful procedures, pretending that all is well in the nation’s capital. As for displaced U.S. tech workers or struggling graduates, thanks to DHS’ open-borders Mayorkas, U.S. specialists who studied in the 22 STEM fields are left to fend for themselves. Mayorkas realizes the harm he’s inflicting on the nation’s prospective white-collar workers, and he knows that Americans object to prioritizing foreign workers. In his tweet that announced the STEM OPT expansion, Mayorkas purposely omitted “foreign student” to create the false impression that DHS is investing in domestic STEM talent.

OPT has been in litigation for more than a decade, challenging whether OPT holders who are no longer students can legally be allowed to work. For all those years, U.S. tech workers have taken the brunt of the government’s illegal ploys that are used against them indiscriminately to give foreign nationals an advantage in the high-skilled labor market.

Joe Guzzardi is a syndicated columnist and PFIR analyst who writes about immigration issues and impacts. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org and joeguzzardi.substack.com.

Who Needs Congress? D.C.’s New Normal

More Foreign Workers Coming To USA

By Joe Guzzardi

During the peak days of coronavirus, Amazon delivery trucks were a familiar sight in neighborhoods across America. Amazon’s logo is a smiley face arrow pointing from “A” to “Z” indicating that the company offers customers products that range from those with names that begin with the letter “a” and all through to the letter “z,” in other words, everything. Shopping at Amazon, the smiling arrow promises, will make consumers happy.

What began in 1994 in Jeff Bezos’ garage as an online bookstore, then called “Cadabra” and with initial earnings of $20,000, Amazon is now recognized worldwide as the place to shop for products as diverse as AAA batteries or zinc tablets, and have them promptly delivered to your front door quickly. Today, Amazon’s market cap is $1.7 trillion. As of January 2022, Bezos is the world’s richest man with a net worth of $195 billion. Amazon is a great American success story. If only Amazon and its founder Jeff Bezos could use their billions-strong financial strength to share their wealth by hiring more Americans and paying them fairly instead of opting for lower-cost overseas workers, their accomplishments might be more broadly hailed.

But when Amazon wants to hire workers, it too often relies on the insidious H-1B, guest worker employment-based visa to fill its needs. In fiscal years 2020 and 2021, at 6,182, Amazon received more approvals for H-1B visas than any other corporation; Microsoft, Google and IBM received 1,200 or more. Worse news for U.S. tech workers is that the decline rate for H-1B visas has, under President Joe Biden, dropped to its lowest level in history which means that more tech jobs will go to Indian and Chinese nationals instead of U.S. citizens.

The National Foundation for American Policy calculated that only 4 percent of petitions were denied in FY 2021, down from 13 percent in FY 2020 and down from the high of 24 percent in FY 2018. NFAP wrote that the status of many H-1B extensions was reviewed under a more restrictive standard than the Trump administration. Those tighter guidelines gave officers at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services more discretion to require additional proof that entry-level computer programming jobs qualify as a “specialty occupation,” a basic requirement for receiving an H-1B visa.

Courts later ruled that the Trump era memo was unlawful. NFAP also wrote that “employers and attorneys have credited USCIS Director Ur Jaddou and the Biden administration for rescinding the October 2017 memo.” Big business, lawyers and the Americans Last Biden White House, all unlimited immigration advocates, hailed Jaddou’s intervention, and defended the H-1B revision as helpful to corporations struggling to find what they term as “high-skilled” or the “best and brightest” employees, myths that have been perpetuated for decades.

The Census Bureau’s 2019 Community Survey, Single-Year Estimates found that among the 50 million employed college graduates ages 25 to 64 in 2019, 37 percent reported a bachelor’s degree in science or engineering but only 14 percent worked in a science, technology, engineering or math-related (STEM) occupations. U.S. tech workers are plentiful, but employers have to seek them out.

Through a series of loopholes, Congress has enabled H-1B visa holders to, instead of the initial six-year time cap on their visas – one three-year period followed by a three-year renewal – remain to work indefinitely, and become U.S. citizens. Because of the “dual intent” provision, H-1B visas holders can now displace American workers, and are rewarded with citizenship. Stated differently, admitted under the guise of being temporary, H-1B holders can become the most permanent of residents, a U.S. citizen.

The decline in H-1B denials trend is guaranteed to continue during Biden’s remaining three years in the White House. The president’s critics wonder why he’s so steadfastly determined to harms both high- and low-skilled U.S. workers. The border influx of mostly limited-skilled and under-educated migrants harm Americans at the lower end of the economic spectrum, while, at the same time, loosening the H-1B visa standards puts college-educated Americans behind the eight-ball when it comes to securing a white-collar job.

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.

More Foreign Workers Coming To USA

More Foreign Workers Coming To USA

Black Caucus Ignores Wage Gap Solutions

By Joe Guzzard

The Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday came and went, as it always does, without a peep from the Congressional Black Caucus about how the influential U.S. representatives could most help African-Americans. If the powerful Caucus, 58 members strong, would demand an immigration pause, black Americans could close the earnings gap between them and other ethnic groups, mostly whites, that has plagued them for at least seven decades.

Economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis found that: “No progress has been made in reducing income and wealth inequalities between black and white households over the past 70 years.” Similar research from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances showed that the median net worth of black households in 2016 was $17,150, while the same statistic at the same time period for white families was $171,000, nearly ten times as high.

Inarguably, more employment-authorized immigration weakens labor markets, and puts downward pressure on wages – the supply and demand law at its most basic. Unchecked immigration also gives cheap, labor-addicted corporations license to under-pay immigrants who need jobs but have limited skills.

In his January 10 Chicago TribuneOp-Ed, “A Major Culprit in the Wage Gap between Blacks and Whites is America’s Immigration Policy,” Frank Morris noted that when the Congressional Black Caucus votes in unison to expand immigration and to authorize more guest worker employment-based visas, they’re rejecting the counsel of earlier black heroes. Morris, drawing in part from Roy Beck’s recently published book, “Back of the Hiring Line,” wrote that during the decades following the Civil War, black leaders like social reformer Frederick Douglass, civil rights champion W.E.B. Du Bois, activist Marcus Garvey and labor unionist A. Philip Randolph who, in 1925, organized and led the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first successful African-American led labor union, all favored restricting immigration to help free enslaved people and their descendants. As Du Bois said, in words that ring as true today as they did then, stopping the importation of cheap labor “on any terms has been the economic salvation of American black labor.”

Not only have blacks in Congress, as well as state and local governments’ black elected officials, turned a deaf ear to historically prominent figures like Douglass, Du Bois, Garvey and Randolph, but they’ve also ignored Coretta Scott King, Martin’s widow who is often referred to as “The First Lady of the Civil Rights Movement.” In 1991, after the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act passed with employer sanctions that penalized hiring illegal immigrants, the Senate began drafting provisions that would weaken those sanctions, and dilute interior enforcement. King and other black community leaders wrote to then-U.S. Sen. Orin Hatch (R- Utah) to urge that he postpone the introduction of his employer sanctions repeal legislation. The group wanted an opportunity to prove to the Senate that a repeal would have a devastating effect on the economic livelihood of low-skilled workers, a disproportionate percentage of whom were African-American and Hispanic. King’s efforts to persuade Hatch were unsuccessful. For more than 30 years, illegal immigrant labor has, just as King feared, severely affected blacks, Hispanics and other minorities, and has denied them an opportunity to move up and into the middle class.

The CBC has abandoned its constituency, choosing to support foreign nationals. Instead of helping struggling blacks, the CBC actively hurts them. The caucus accepts without criticism the current illegal alien border surge which will eventually loosen the labor market when the aliens are paroled with work permits. The caucus votes as a block in favor of immigration-expansion legislation including amnesty for millions, and it promotes paths to citizenship for deferred action and temporary protected status holders. American blacks are excluded from CBC’s progressive agenda which guarantees that, for years to come, the wage gap between African-Americans and whites will remain unchanged.


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.

Black Caucus Ignores Wage Gap Solutions

Throwing Money At Migration Means More Failure

By Joe Guzzardi

Vice President Kamala Harris, doubtlessly growing exasperated by the criticism she’s received for neglecting her Southwest border duties, called on Wall Street chief executive officers to help her sort out immigration problems. The summoned executives came from prominent commercial banks like J P Morgan Chase and Citigroup, as well as industry titans from Microsoft, Chobani, PepsiCo Latin America, Cargill and Airbnb.

In early January, Harris announced more than $1.2 billion in new funding to address, as she so often calls it, the “root causes” of migration to the United States. The concept is to foster more economic opportunity in the Northern Triangle countries of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador to deter illegal immigration. Harris made the announcement during a roundtable with the CEOs. Offering a preview of Harris’ announcement to reporters, a Senior White House representative praised “her leadership, her vision.”

A more complete analysis of the promised funding is that it represents a major commitment by the big businesses, but no money has been invested yet, no jobs have been created, and no one even knows if the subsidy, assuming it ever gets off the ground, will have the promised effect – deterring illegal immigration. A look back at history suggests that Harris’ throw-money-at-the-problem plan is doomed to fail, and colossally.

Not that long ago, in 2015 to be exact, and under exactly the identical circumstances of border surging that included large numbers of unaccompanied minors, the Obama administration proposed a huge investment in the Northern Triangle countries. Then-Vice-President Joe Biden wrote a New York Times op-ed titled “A Plan for Central America” which envisioned “systematic change” that would stabilize neighborhoods to reduce crime, encourage investments and create more effective tax collections among local governments. Biden promised that the Obama administration’s financial support would end “endemic violence and poverty.”

In his op-ed, Biden also compared the Obama administration’s proposed team up with the Alliance for Prosperity to the 1999 Plan Colombia, a failed six-year, $9 billion anti-drug experiment. By 2006, the State Department, then under President George Bush’s direction, shifted its funding to Mexico, and the Merida Initiative with part of its funding designated for Central America. The initiative promised to curtail “the illicit flow of drugs, people, arms, and cash,” a vow that has been broken virtually since the moment the ink dried on the pact.

In 2010, the Central America program was separated from the Merida Initiative, and repackaged as CARI. From 2008 to 2013, the Merida Initiative and CARI received more than $2 billion and $574 million in federal funding, respectively. But CARI did nothing to stem violence or to reduce the migrant surge into the U.S. If anything, the opposite happened. In Honduras and Guatemala, homicide rates climbed steadily as U.S. funding for militarization via CARI began to flow. Honduras sent the largest number of kids to the U.S. border, followed by Guatemala. In 2012, two full years into CARI, there were 7,172 recorded homicides in Honduras, marking the most violent year in the country’s recent history. Murders in Honduras have since declined, but are still an unacceptably high at 3,496 in 2020.

Over the years, the U.S. has poured billions of dollars into the Northern Triangle countries with little to show for the money invested. Thousands of poetic words have been spoken and written like Biden’s and Harris’ about U.S. commitment to help the Northern Triangle nations help themselves. But Harris, the so-called border czar knows, as well as anyone, that with the borders wide open and beckoning, no amount of money or posturing, flowery editorials or public relations-written canned speeches will stop traffickers from bringing drugs and humans north. The National Center for Health Statistics reported that drug overdose deaths in the U.S. during 2020 soared 31 percent to 91,977. Sex trafficking for profit is big business, but prosecutions for those crimes are rare. Through its willful neglect, the Biden and Harris administration encourages trafficking despite its tragic and preventable cost in American lives.

As of early January 2022, the White House has given no indication that it will stop the huge inflow – a record high 1.7 million-plus during 2021 – of mainly poor, unskilled and under-educated migrants. Few fault migrants for wanting to improve their lives. But the unasked and therefore unanswered question is what will happen to education, health care, housing and myriad social challenges if, as appears probable, those waves of migrants continue coming. The latest Census Bureau data indicates that the U.S. has 37 million people that it classifies as living in poverty, and millions of Americans unemployed or underemployed. Struggling Americans are nowhere on the Biden administration’s radar.

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.

Throwing Money At Migration Means More Failure

MLB Lockout Is Billionaires Versus Multimillionaires

By Joe Guzzardi

Major League Baseball’s player lockout had no sooner begun than commissioner Rob Manfred sent a letter to fans attempting to assuage ire about the possibility of another partial season – the sixth in 50 years – or even no season at all.

Fans can read through Manfred’s letter, but cutting through its tedious gobbledygook, the bottom line is that the billionaire owners, who preside over a multibillion-dollar industry, want to keep as much of their fortune as possible. The players, many of them already multi-millionaires, want to earn oodles more even sooner. MLB has at least ten billionaire owners; four of them have a net worth that exceeds $2 billion. The New York Yankees are the wealthiest team; it’s valued at $5.25 billion.

From a list of the 20 richest players that includes the active, the retired and the disgraced, their net worth ranges from a low of $80 million – CC Sabathia – to the highest – Alex Rodriguez – $350 million. In 2021, the average player’s salary was $4.2 million, nearly a two-fold increase since 2003, while the 2019 median household income was $69,000. The minimum MLB salary for an eight-month work schedule is $570,000. Fans have no rooting interest in the confrontation between owners and players; a pox on both their houses is a commonly heard rebuttal to clashes between the billionaires and the millionaires.

Baseball is in trouble, not a news flash, but an indisputable fact that should grow more worrisome to the commissioner, the owners and the players. On the field, a single game illustrates baseball’s woes: the World Series, 1960, game seven, Pittsburgh Pirates against the New York Yankees: a day game, played on grass, that the Pirates won, 10-9. Even though the teams scored 19 runs, and combined for 26 hits, the game wrapped up in a tidy 2:36.

Today’s fans, especially the younger ones that baseball desperately needs as it plods forward, find the games too long and too boring. The average length of nine-inning games in 2021 was a record 3:10, compared to about 2 hours and 30 minutes in the 1970s. Games in the 2021 postseason were even longer. The average length of a nine-inning game was 3 hours and 37 minutes with nine of the 36 games grinding endlessly on four hours or longer.

The major culprit is the number of pitchers used in a game. The 2020 rule which requires that, barring injury, a pitcher must face a minimum of three batters or complete an inning before he can be removed is ineffective. In the 2021 regular season teams used a record 3.4 relief pitchers per game. In the postseason, nearly half the starting pitchers were yanked before the sixth inning which boosted the average number of relievers summoned in a nine-inning game to 4.3. No surprise then that last 30 World Series games have all ended past 11 p.m. EDT. Back in 1960, the Pirates finished off the Yankees at 3:36 p.m.

Today, MLB has more in common with Apple than it does with what was once reverently referred to as the national pastime. Immediately endangered is Spring Training which, in the dead of winter, fans eagerly anticipate – sunny skies, swaying palm trees, green grass and fastballs. Assuming the games are played, bring your wallet. The well-heeled Yankees charge $100 for standing room tickets.

Dinosaur fans remember a happier era when the months leading up to Spring Training were about baseball, not lockouts. No fans had the months between February and April better than Brooklyn Dodgers’ rooters who visited Dodgertown, in Vero Beach, Fla.

In his book, “Dodgertown,” author Mark Langill described how the camp became the fruition of team executive Branch Rickey’s long-time dream to bring his players together in a single, top-notch training facility so that all the Dodgers – regulars and minor leaguers – could be evaluated at the same time. Vero Beach, with its vacant, post-World War II Naval facility, was the perfect place. Dodgertown provided dozens of batting cages, two mechanical pitchers, an electric eye umpire that also measured the velocity of each pitch, a sliding pit and a track coach. Some of those baseball-oriented features were Rickey’s innovations. Off the field, the Dodgers kept their players occupied and happy by providing jukeboxes, shuffleboard, horseshoes, croquet and pinball machines. Food was readily and abundantly available. “Take all you want, but eat all you take,” read the cafeteria sign.

But just as the Dodgers left Brooklyn in 1957 for Los Angeles’ lucre, they abandoned Vero Beach in 2009 for the more profitable Camelback Ranch. The Arizona facility offers tourists more than 150 Dodgers caps for sums that range up to $65.00. Those lordly prices help explain why the Dodgers franchise has $3.6 billion value, and why baseball fans are turned off.

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

MLB Lockout Is Billionaires Versus Multimillionaires MLB Lockout Is Billionaires Versus Multimillionaires

Harry Reid Once Championed Pro-American Immigration Reform

By Joe Guzzardi

On Jan. 12, former Senate Majority leader Harry Reid will lie in state at the Capitol Rotunda, following a Jan. 8 funeral in Nevada. Reid joins a long and growing list for this honor that was once limited to former presidents and military leaders, but now includes ordinary citizens.

Since 2000, the number of deceased Americans who have lain in the Capitol is 13. In the previous two decades, the total honorees was four, including two Capitol police officers killed in the line of duty, Florida Sen. Claude D. Pepper and an unknown soldier from the Vietnam War. Going back further to the 1960s and 1970s, Congress honored only eight Americans, including four presidents. No law, written rule or regulation specifies who may lie in state. Concurrent action by the House and Senate determines who will lie in state in the rotunda, assuming the family approves. The honor is at risk of becoming partisan.

Shortly after Reid’s death, legislators from both sides of the aisle sung the Nevada Democrat’s praises. South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham said that Reid would be in his prayers, that he was “a good man” who fought hard for his causes, and that he will be missed. Chuck Schumer, who holds Reid’s old job in the Senate, said that his friend always “looked out for people.”

Schumer’s praise for his old friend and mentor is more insightful than he might have imagined. Reid once championed meaningful immigration reform that would have benefited Americans, especially blue-collar workers. Eventually, Reid drifted over to the extreme left, and supported illegal immigrant amnesties as well as more employment-based visas.

In 1993, about six years after Nevada voters promoted him from the U.S. House of Representative to the Senate, Reid introduced a far-reaching comprehensive immigration reform bill that Democrats, especially former President Barack Obama and Schumer, would prefer to forget about. As per a press release issued from his office, Reid outlined what he called “the first and only comprehensive immigration reform bill in Congress,” the Immigration Stabilization Act of 1993 (ISA).

The first item of business the press release addressed was to overhaul the nation’s immigration laws and begin “a massive scale-down of immigrants allowed into the country from approximately 800,000 to 300,000.” Legal immigration reduction groups have been lobbying for similar reductions for years. The current 1 million-plus annual lawful permanent residents is an unsustainable level since chain migration eventually converts the initial 1 million immigrants into about 3 million. A Princeton University study found that, on average, each immigrant petitions slightly more than three family members to join him in the U.S.

Another long-sought change reductionists have favored for decades: ending birthright citizenship. Reid wanted clarified that a U.S.-born child to an alien mother who is not a lawful resident should not be considered a U.S. citizen. If ISA were approved, Reid said the incentive for pregnant alien women to enter illegally, often at risk to mother and child, for the purpose of acquiring citizenship for the child and to then receive federal benefits would be eliminated.

Other Reid recommendations have a familiar ring: a “crack down” – Reid’s wording – on illegal immigration, then an estimated 3.3 million, ending asylum fraud along with the “phony” claims that allow unqualified aliens to enter, excluding aliens who cannot financially support themselves without assistance, and beefing up border security.

For a period, too short as things turned out, Reid was committed to rational immigration. In his 1994 Los Angeles Times Op-Ed, Reid scorned his colleagues for their failure to reduce legal immigration, and he urged lawmakers to reject “unfounded” racism charges to act “quickly” to pass ISA. He concluded that the “real injustice to future Americans would be to do nothing [to reduce immigration].”

Reid was a spot-on prognosticator. Congress did nothing, and in the three decades that have passed, the illegal immigrant population has quadrupled from 3 million to nearly 12 million. The border that Reid wanted to reinforce is a horror show as officials predict that 2 million aliens will cross illegally this year.

In his official statement about Reid’s death, President Joe Biden praised him “for his power to do right for the people.” Reid was, Biden concluded, a “giant.” Had Reid stuck to his 1993 immigration wish list, he would have done “right for the people,” and could truly be remembered as a giant. Instead, Reid dropped the ball and – platitudes being heaped on him aside – was just another politician whose views shifted with the Capitol Hill winds.

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

Harry Reid Once Championed Pro-American Immigration Reform Harry Reid Once Championed Pro-American Immigration Reform