Category: Joe Guzzardi

Black Mississippi Ag Workers Displaced By White South Africans

By Joe Guzzardi

For decades, agriculture employers have claimed that an inability to find willing American workers forces them to hire foreign-born labor. Sometimes the foreign-born workers are legally authorized and hold State Department H-2A, temporary, nonimmigrant visas. Other times, they’re illegally employed in the cash-only, under-the-table market.

The “jobs Americans won’t do” meme is convenient for employers who prefer to hire temporary visa holders who they know will work for lower wages than Americans. But too often, foreign labor displaces proven, long-standing American workers; they become cheap labor-addicted employers’ victims. Employers realize that the H-2A is a visa they can easily exploit, and for years, the unscrupulous among them have taken full advantage. Farm labor shortages nationwide, in part COVID-19 related, created an H-2A visa spike from 55,384 in FY 2011 to 213,394 in FY 2020.

In the Mississippi Delta heartland, where the unemployment rate hovers around 10 percent, H-2A ag visa workers from South Africa, mostly white, have slowly replaced American blacks who, for generations, have toiled faithfully in the fields. In a federal lawsuit filed by Richard Strong and five other ag workers against Pitts Farm Partnership (PFP), the plaintiffs allege that not only did they lose their jobs to South Africans, but the overseas workers earned higher wages than they had previously been paid. Paying the visa holders more than the displaced Americans is a variation from the norm, but more about that later.

The Mississippi Justice Center (MJC), whose mission it is to dismantle the policies that have kept Mississippians at the bottom of nearly every social and fiscal indicator of human advancement, charges that many corporate farms in the Delta cheat the local black workforce by illegally exploiting the H-2A visa program and that owners defrauded the government, violating U.S. immigration and civil rights laws.

Indeed, PFP directly violated one of the H-2A’s most fundamental requirements. Employers must, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services website, “Demonstrate that there are not enough U.S. workers who are able, willing, qualified, and available to do the temporary work.” Demonstrating a shortage of available U.S. workers is impossible since dozens of farm workers were on the job when the South Africans arrived. Indisputably, that’s an obvious crime committed by the ag employers.

The other egregious employer crime that MJC should investigate is whether the visa holders are labor exploitation victims. A veteran black farm worker, grown older, cannot work as long or as quickly as younger South Africans. An employer can hire two overseas employees at $11.00/hour, work them extended hours, and thereby get more production from international hires than he likely could from three older $7.25 U.S. workers. How many hours and under what conditions the H-2As work are rarely investigated by the U.S. Department of Labor. Laborers are uncomfortable reporting abuses to the DOL since their employers can allege the overseas worker is not fulfilling the conditions of his visa, and deportation proceedings can begin. Over time, the link between a controlling employer and subservient employee becomes modern-day indentured servitude.

To American workers’ detriment, numerous industries staff H-2As as part of their business plans for landscaping, forestry, amusement parks, recreation, housekeeping, construction, au pairs and camp counselors. As long as Congress makes overseas workers readily available and keeps few tabs on their employers, U.S. workers will be shunned. Congress should mandate that ag employers mechanize, like so many other Western countries have done. Technological advancements in farming have helped decrease the amount of labor-intensive work and have increased yields by up to 100 percent. Machines, after all, can work 24/7, seven days a week, and 365 days a year.


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 Mississippi Ag Workers Displaced By Visa Holders

Biden Gives Sponsor Circles To Afghan Evacuees

By Joe Guzzardi

In her October 22 New York Times opinion piece, “Angela Merkel Was Right,” journalist Michelle Goldberg praises the German chancellor for her bold 2015 decision to resettle about 800,000 Syrian refugees. Experts like former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson who predicted doom and gloom for Germany after Merkel threw open the borders were wrong, Goldberg wrote. Merkel, on the other hand, was correct, and now because of the refugees’ contributions, Germany is a better place.

High on the list of Merkel’s triumphs, Goldberg wrote, was the new, more vigorous labor force that refugees represented. Bonus: the Syrians, continued Goldberg, would boost Germany’s stagnant population growth. Goldberg’s sub rosa message is that if the U.S. followed Germany’s example, adding more refugees would revitalize the domestic economy. Moreover, Goldberg suggested, since Syrians have so seamlessly integrated into German society, Afghan evacuees might do the same and thus help end U.S. divisiveness.

Not all went as smoothly as Goldberg suggested. In the years immediately following Merkel’s decision, crime in Germany spiked. Statistics related to violent crime showed that, in 2017, 10.4 percent of murder suspects and 11.9 percent of sexual offense suspects were asylum-seekers and refugees. Many migrants formed gangs and perpetrated some of the most heinous imaginable crimes.

Beyond the considerable societal challenges that refugee resettlement often brings, timing for the accepting country must be factored into any decision to admit large numbers of foreign nationals. In 2015, Germany wasn’t undergoing a continuous wave of illegal immigration as the U.S. is today. As of late October, an estimated 1.7 million illegal aliens from more than 160 nations were detained at the Southwest border. Most will eventually be admitted to the U.S. population, and rewarded with employment permission.

The federal government will have its hands full dealing with the multiple needs of under-educated, low-skilled, non-English speaking foreign nationals without adding thousands more refugees, asylees and evacuees. The federal government has already failed dismally to cope with the estimated 11 million, possibly as many as 20 million, illegal immigrants. Another large caravan is headed toward the border, and determined to get past what is now only token protection.

Unlike Germany, a largely well-run country, the U.S. is and has been politically dysfunctional for decades. Germany has a successful on-the-job training record, while the U.S. has mostly abandoned training employees and offering trade school education. Unions have been decimated. Workers are poorly paid and generally treated even worse. These failures also argue strongly against adding a new population that would further put U.S. citizens at a labor market and public education disadvantage.

Goldberg is doubtless sincere in her recommendation that the U.S. adopt a more welcoming system to accommodate a higher refugee total. For Goldberg and other refugee advocates, they suddenly have a unique chance to lead the way on compassionate resettlement. The Biden administration’s State Department recently agreed to let private groups of five individuals form sponsoring units that could, for a 90-day period, be responsible for resettling Afghan evacuees. The sponsorswill be expected to provide for the evacuees’ basic necessities such as clothing, groceries and household furnishings, as well as assist with processes to access federal, state and local benefits, and introduce the evacuees to the local community.

The congressional wealthy who have throughout their careers voted in favor of higher refugee intake could and should also step up to the plate. Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Mitt Romney (R-UT) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) have consistently voted for higher refugee resettlement totals. They’re among Congress’ richest legislators, multimillionaires all, each of whom have multiple homes.

The flaw in the so-called “sponsor circles” is that the guardianship period lasts only 90 days, insufficient time for Afghan evacuees or other refugees to accustom themselves to American life. Most refugees need assistance for many years; eventually, the responsibility to provide for them will fall on voiceless state and local taxpayers.

In the end, despite interim, partial solutions like the sponsor circles, the federal government must develop a refugee program consistent with the public’s wishes, its ability to integrate new arrivals, and maintain a sustainable, stable future. A haphazard evacuation of tens of thousands of unvetted Afghans doesn’t meet that definition. Americans want to help Afghans, but the evacuees’ presence was thrust upon them. The elite and the wealthiest are better prepared to provide immediate assistance than others. Let them be the first among Americans to set an example; others will follow.

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.

Biden Gives Sponsor Circles To Afghan Evacuees

Build Back Better Bad News For Tech Workers

By Joe Guzzardi

While a disbelieving nation is focused on the endless border crisis, more immigration sleight of hand is ongoing in Washington. Cloaked in Congress-speak, the troubling details of the Build Back Better Act (BBB) are being hidden from a bad-news weary public.

The National Border Patrol Council’s Rio Grande Valley chapter vice president Chris Cabrera told Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) that the widely cited 400,000 “got-aways” represents a significant undercount. The total number of aliens who evaded border patrol detection is, Cabrera said, “at least twice if not three times that number,” as many as 1.2 million illegal immigrants. Add the 1.2 million not tallied to those among the 1.7 million caught and released in fiscal year 2021, and all of a sudden, the U.S. has a new population roughly the equivalent size of Phoenix, the country’s fifth largest city.

The border crisis is public, seen in its full inglorious detail on the nightly news. Congress’ immigration shenanigans occur behind closed doors and are incomprehensible to nonimmigration lawyers. Nevertheless, the open borders and Capitol Hill wrangling have the same goal: a huge, nation-altering immigration increase.

Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough rejected amnesty Plans “A” and “B,” concluding each time that transformative immigration changes don’t belong in budget reconciliation legislation. That should have ended the amnesty discussion. But, undeterred, expansionist Democratic senators have nevertheless stealthily included provisions in BBB that will significantly increase legal immigration and subsequent chain migration. Writing for the Center for Immigration Studies, Robert Law, a former U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services official, noted that pro-expansion advocates have tried to hide the reconciliation bill’s massive immigration increases through “an accounting scam,” commonly known as “visa recapture.”

Every year, the State Department offers 140,000 work visas, 226,000 family-sponsored visas and 50,000 diversity visas to prospective immigrants. The reconciliation bill proposes going all the way back to 1992 to “capture” and reuse unissued visas, and to make them available to potential immigrants. Law wrote that recapturing visas, as the reconciliation bill proposes, violates existing immigration law; in effect, there’s no such thing as an unused visa. Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) wrote in protest to his Independent Vermont colleague Bernie Sanders, and called the recapture provisions “the crown jewel of corporate lobbying.” Breaking immigration law, however, isn’t a roadblock for the Biden administration – witness the border crisis which the president and his Department of Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas created and encourage.

BBB has more destructive provisions aimed at U.S. tech workers which would further enrich cheap labor-addicted employers. Under the proposed legislation, an illegal alien already in the U.S., and with a two-year wait for his Green Card, could, assuming his sponsoring employer pays a $5,000 fee, adjust his immigration status to lawful permanent resident, exempt from annual limits and per-country caps.

About 583,420 H-1B visa holders and their families would jump to the head of the Green Card line. Hundreds of thousands of U.S. tech workers have had their personal and professional careers ruined by callous Big Tech employers who have exploited H-1B visa rules to hire cheaper foreign-born workers while they pass over more qualified Americans.

In his same letter to Sanders, Hagerty summed up how ruinous BBB would be for U.S. tech workers: Those provisions “effectively terminate, for at least 10 years, all numerical limits on the annual allotment of green cards,” allowing “technology companies across America to employ a functionally limitless supply of cheaper foreign labor in place of willing, able, and qualified American workers.”

More than destructive to U.S. tech workers, BBB will create population spikes so dramatic that the U.S. Census Bureau will have to revise dramatically upward its growth projections. Pre-BBB and the open Southwest Border, the Census Bureau projected that U.S. population would grow by 79 million people between 2017-2060, with roughly 90 percent of that growth resulting from Congress’ immigration policies. Americans don’t want more sprawl, more traffic and a less enjoyable quality of life.

A growing number of Americans feel that Biden is too focused, and at their expense, on bettering illegal immigrants’ lives and accommodating the donor class. The $185 trillion BBB bill is a glaring example – vague promises about reaching climate goals, the proverbial vows to create millions of better jobs, affordable childcare availability, and other familiar, but never-kept pledges to improve Americans’ lives.

Immigration increases will change Americans lives, and should be discussed front and center in the Senate Judiciary Committee, not tucked away in the small print of a voluminous 1,684-pages bill that only a scattered handful of Senate aides have even read.

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.

Build Back Better Bad News For Tech Workers

Job Turnaround Hopes Realistic?

By Joe Guzzardi

The October Bureau of Labor Statistics report showed that the economy boomed forward with a higher than anticipated 531,000 new jobs, a good sign for workers across the board. Wall Street analysts had predicted that 450,000 jobs would be added.

Private payrolls jumped 604,000 while the unemployment rate fell to 4.6 percent from 4.8 percent. BLS also revised up the total jobs for August and September by 235,000 in part because it recalculated seasonal factors. The economy registered its strongest growth in the leisure and hospitality sectors, 164,000, followed by manufacturing, 60,000, then transportation, 54,000, construction, 44,000, and healthcare, 37,000.

No doubt the labor market and Biden administration benefited from the coronavirus case decline, and employers’ renewed push to hire. Also contributing to the surprisingly strong October report was the post-Labor Day pandemic unemployment programs’ expiration that included the $300 federal bonus and extended eligibility from the traditional 26 weeks to 79 weeks.

In October, some demographic sectors benefited greatly, specifically female workers. Women represent about 57 percent of October’s job gains, 370,000, a dramatic shift from September when men gained all of that month’s new jobs, but more than 300,000 women left the labor force.

More female workers could soon be re-entering the labor pool. Jasmine Tucker, the National Women’s Law Center director, said that women are enjoying a “turnaround.” Tucker points to a return to in-person learning, and an hourly wage increase for hospitality and leisure workers from $17.12 per hour in October 2020 to $19.04 per hour only one year later. But, a hitch: Tucker estimates that, assuming October’s vigorous pace continues, it would take about eight months for the economy to gain back the nearly five million jobs lost during the pandemic.

Several demographic groups suffered an unemployment spike between September and October, including white women who went from 3.7 percent to 3.9 percent; Asian women, 3.4 percent to 4.4 percent, and Hispanics, 5.6 percent to 5.7 percent. Nearly one woman in every three, or 32.6 percent, who were unemployed in October had been out of work for six months or longer.

On behalf of women who successfully landed jobs in October, and want to keep their positions as well as in the best interests of women still seeking employment, the NWLC should immediately demand that the Biden administration stop handing out employment permits indiscriminately to border crashers, and to other illegal immigrants who have reached the interior. An estimated 160,000 illegal aliensnow in the interior have received parole, an immigration status that includes work permission. Most are low-skilled, and will compete head-to-head with workers, women and otherwise, in leisure and other occupations that don’t require more than a high-school degree.

American minorities, those seeking jobs and those already employed are especially vulnerable to an immigration-driven expanded, cheap labor pool. Numerous academic studies, including many done by liberal-leaning, pro-immigration analysts, found conclusively that immigrant labor, when readily available, depresses U.S. wages.

No analyst fits the “liberal-leaning, pro-immigrant” label better than New York Timesop-ed columnist and Graduate Center of the City University of New York economics professor Paul Krugman. Showing a mastery of Econ 101 and other economic principals he learned while earning MA and PhD degrees at MIT, Krugman wrote: “Immigration reduces the wages of domestic workers who compete with immigrants. That’s just supply and demand: we’re talking about large increases in the number of low-skill workers relative to other inputs into production, so it’s inevitable that this means a fall in wages.”

Since Krugman’s conclusion is inarguable, advocacy organizations like the NWLC, founded in the 1970s, comprised of lawyers and activists who seek justice for their constituency, need to step up immediately to oppose the Biden administration’s employment authorization giveaway. The border invasion shows no sign of slowing. Detentions and arrests at America’s Southwest border hit an all-time high in 2021. More than 1.7 million migrants were detained at the border, a significant percentage of which will eventually become work authorized, and expand the labor market – terrible news for U.S. workers.

Biden could reverse the open borders course he’s chosen to pursue. But he prefers to welcome the world, give corporate employers a helping hand, and keep Americans struggling to recover from the job-killer pandemic. Future BLS reports may indicate a strong economy, but the important variable is that new jobs go to citizens and lawfully present residents, not aliens who knowingly violated U.S. laws.

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.

Job Turnaround Hopes Realistic?

Fentanyl Deaths Reach Record High

By Joe Guzzardi

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that last year in the United States more than 93,000 people died of drug overdoses, the largest number of drug-related deaths ever confirmed in a single year. In 2020, led by fentanyl-related fatalities, opioid deaths accounted for 75 percent of all overdose fatalities.

Unlike other industries that suffered business losses during the COVID-19 pandemic, drug runners enjoyed a booming, near-insatiable trade. One reason, explained the National Institutes of Health’s director Dr. Nora Volkow, is that since fentanyl is easily produced, and only a small hit creates an addictive high, it’s effortless to smuggle across the border. Unchecked fentanyl trafficking has had, in addition to soaring death rates, other adverse consequences. Among the impacts that Dr. Volkow identified are “decreased access to addiction treatment, increased social and economic stressors, and overburdened health departments….” These harmful variables, Dr. Volkow concluded, “collided in 2020 and were associated with a tragic rise in overdose deaths.”

Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that experts consider up to 100 times stronger than morphine and 50 times stronger than heroin, two other drugs that, when used for other-than medical applications, are addictive and deadly. Most commonly, fentanyl flows from China, through Mexico and its cartels, then proceeds northward on routes that lead to the San Diego border, finally arriving at the U.S. interior.

Another popular method of pure fentanyl distribution is directly from Chinese laboratories to U.S. customers via the mail, packed in small, hard-to-detect packages. In January 2020, the Drug Enforcement Agency wrote that Mexican transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) were “producing increased quantities of fentanyl and illicit fentanyl-containing tablets, with some TCOs using increasingly sophisticated clandestine laboratories and processing methods.” One kilogram of pure Chinese fentanyl, about a $3,300 to $5,000 wholesale cost, can be converted into a diluted powder sold at a $300,000 street value. The further fentanyl travels from its border entry point, the steeper the retail value rises.

America’s battle against fentanyl is the latest, most damaging lost War on Drugsthat the U.S. has suffered since 1970 when President Richard M. Nixon signed the Controlled Substances Act. In the psychedelic era, drugs were, President Nixon said, “Public Enemy No. 1.” Determined to roust drugs out of U.S. society, President Nixon followed up when he created the Drug Enforcement Agency in 1973. At the agency’s outset, DEA employed 1,470 special agents and functioned with a budget of under $75 million a year. Today, the agency has nearly 5,000 agents and an annual budget of more than $2 billion. Despite spending $1 trillion over the last five decades, the War on Drugs has failed cataclysmically. The War will continue to be unsuccessful as long as the Biden administration’s open borders persist. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, acting with President Biden’s tacit endorsement, unashamedly refuses to do his sworn duty to protect the nation against invasion, and has thereby paved the way for drug contraband, and the deaths that go together with it, to continue unchecked.

CBP cannot cope with the unprecedented U.S. invasion, 200,000+ illegal immigrants in July and August, and seize fentanyl and other addictive drugs at the same time. The Center for Immigration Studies’ Andrew Arthur, a retired immigration judge who reported from Texas’ Del Rio sector, noted that CBP is stretched to “the breaking point.” Administratively attending to surging aliens takes time away from the agents’ principal task of stopping illegal entry. About 40 percent of CBP agents are “off the line,” meaning that they’re performing nonborder security-related tasks like migrant child care, feeding unaccompanied minors and providing comfort to weary travelers.

Biden and his White House have proactively chosen to allow cartels and other criminals to ply their multibillion-dollar enterprise, a larger cash cow than Walmart, safe from the federal government’s intervention. To the Biden administration, last year’s 93,000 American deaths are an inconvenient truth that won’t stop it from pursuing its open border, end-America agenda.

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.

Fentanyl Deaths Reach Record High

Citizens Wonder Does Biden Care?

By Joe Guzzardi

When future historians look back at Joe Biden’s presidency, they may identify October 2021 as the point in time when his agenda became clear to all: subvert and destroy sovereign America.

Unmistakable and undeniable signs of Biden’s goal to irreversibly and forever recreate America in the image his puppeteers – former President Barack Obama; current Director of the Domestic Policy Council, Susan Rice, and Interim Obama Foundation president Valerie Jarrett, to name a few of many – mapped out for him.

During his presidential campaign and since his inauguration, Biden has shown few if any signs that he cares about America or Americans. Early on, Biden disregarded the border surges, waved in about 37,000 mostly unvettedAfghan evacuees, with more on the way. Today, with a large illegal alien caravan bowling over Mexican enforcement personnel on their way to Texas, not a soul in the White House, the cabinet or those among Biden’s confidants has indicated concern about the blatant ongoing immigration law violations.

During October, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas busied himself with protecting the illegal immigrants en route and those already in the interior. Mayorkas’ memorandums made immigration law enforcement impossible. On October 12, Mayorkas ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to adopt a hands-off policy regarding illegal aliens at workplaces. Illegal alien employees may have displaced U.S. workers or through their presence hindered American workers from successfully obtaining employment. In his memo, “Guidelines for the Enforcement of Civil Immigration Law,” the only categories of alien that DHS, ICE or CBP might target are national security or public safety threats.

Mayorkas also created what DHS refers to as “protected areas,” locations where illegally present aliens may gather, but will now be off-limits for ICE and CBP. Protected areas include but aren’t limited to churches, colleges, parades, demonstrations, rallies, social or medical services locations, vocational or trade schools, and children’s playgrounds.

As if the DHS commitment to shielding 11 to 20 million illegal immigrants (or more) isn’t worrisome enough and deeply discouraging to citizens and to legally present aliens and backlogged foreign nationals following the correct immigration procedures, an October 28 Wall Street Journal story proved how over-the-top the Biden administration is vis-à-vis aiding and abetting unlawful presence.

The Journal wrote that the Biden administration’s departments of Justice, Health and Human Services and DHS are in internal discussions to reward illegal immigrants separated during the Trump administration at the rate of $450,000 per individual. On average, each family’s demands total about $3.4 million. The proposed settlement sum is in response to the American Civil Liberties Union’s lawsuit brought on behalf of parents and children who allegedly at the government’s hand suffered potentially irreversible psychological damage when they were separated at the Southwest border. Noteworthy: the multimillion-dollar recompense to aliens who voluntarily, willingly and knowingly broke U.S. laws would exceed the $2 million payouts made to 9/11 victims. And, incomprehensibly, illegal aliens are treated much more generously than military war widows and widowers. The nation’s defenders, killed in the line of duty, receive a comparative pittance, a one-time $100,000 death gratuity.

Biden’s expansive treatment toward and condonement of illegal immigrants invites more of the same. In fiscal year 2021, border apprehensions reached a record high 1.7 million. The open border also has been a financial goldmine for drug and human traffickers, criminal enterprises that the federal government purportedly condemns. But given its refusal to deter the illicit activity, the government actually is endorsing illegal activity. Assuming Biden can complete his term, he has three years left in his presidency to turn his attention to bettering Americans’ lives.

Search as Americans might for clues that the Biden administration may soon elevate U.S. citizens to the same status aliens enjoy within the White House, there’s no indication a policy shift is on the way.

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.

Citizens Wonder Does Biden Care?

Citizens Wonder Does Biden Care?

Immigration Mayorkas-Style

By Joe Guzzardi

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has instituted immigration policies that make the 2021 United States the least secure it’s been in years. In the process of ignoring enforcement, Mayorkas is breaking immigration laws that previous Congresses have passed, and earlier presidents have signed.

In his Oct. 12 policy memo distributed to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Mayorkas revealed his latest in a long line of assaults on federal laws that include proactively encouraging mass illegal immigration at the southern border and gutting interior enforcement. Then, in late October, Mayorkas released yet another memo that neuters CBP and ICE. His so-called “guidance” bars immigration officials from entering “protected areas,” a vague category that could mean anywhere. Mayorkas’ reasoning is that ICE, by its mere presence, must not threaten aliens with possible deportation. The reality is, however, that illegal immigrants not suspected of criminal activity have effectively a zero chance of deportation.

A senior DHS official revealed that of the nearly 2 million migrants Homeland Security and Border Patrol encountered in FY2021, a historic high, more than 1.5 million crossed after President Biden’s inauguration and after his dramatic abandonment of the Trump administration’s immigration and border security guidelines. The report’s total excludes about 400,000 “got-aways” that have also joined the general interior population. As for the record-high totals, Mayorkas dismissed them as “nothing new.”

The 2 million illegal immigrants and the aliens who preceded them benefited from excellent timing. In September, Mayorkas announced that DHS would no longer pursue the 11 million illegally present aliens unless they had violent criminal histories or posed national security threats. Mayorkas’ excuse for his criminal neglect is the same impossible-to-confirm one the Obama administration fell back on: “limited resources.”

Mayorkas’ October bulletins, his latest anti-enforcement shoes to drop that represent a de facto amnesty, proclaimed that DHS would end workplace onsite actions which are specifically intended to remove illegal alien employees from their jobs. Then, Mayorkas deceptively added that DHS “has a critical role to ensure our nation’s workplaces comply with our laws,” and that his agency would not “tolerate unscrupulous employers who exploit unauthorized workers….” Under Mayorkas’ direction, DHS has given no indication that the agency is intent on complying with U.S. immigration laws at the workplace or anywhere else.

Unmistakably, Mayorkas is in direct violation of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, signed by President Ronald Reagan after approved by a Congress that included then-Delaware Sen. Joe Biden, which unambiguously forbids and identifies as a criminal act illegal immigrant hiring. Congress, motivated by a two-fold desire to cut off the jobs magnet that lures illegal immigrants north and to protect American workers, overwhelmingly passed IRCA.

With a mere memo, Mayorkas wiped out IRCA, and took another big step forward toward facilitating the displacement of American workers. Hiring illegal immigrants is a crime, but under Mayorkas, employers get off scot-free. Employers who hire unlawfully present workers will escape punishment unless they have engaged in “abusive and exploitative labor practices.” The penalty under U.S. law for employing an individual not authorized to legally work in the U.S. ranges up to $16,000 per alien, and up to ten years in prison.

With the 20,000-personnel-strong ICE mostly gutted, and its 400 worldwide offices limited in their operational scope, Mayorkas has put Americans’ safety in jeopardy. During 2020, on an average day, ICE seized 4,000 pounds of narcotics, managed 3.3 million immigration cases, issued 335 detainers, arrested 87 criminals, made 284 administrative arrests, seized $4.93 million in illicit currency and assets, conducted 509 removals and deported 12 gang members.

With violent crime spiking in 2021, police officers leaving their jobs and now ICE all but dismantled, the Biden-Mayorkas tandem has put law-abiding citizens more in harm’s way than at any time in the past, and for no apparent reason other than to pursue their dangerous political agenda.

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.

Immigration Mayorkas-Style

Immigration Mayorkas-Style