Category: Joe Guzzardi

Border Admissions Staggering Mayorkas Admits

Border Admissions Staggering Mayorkas Admits

By Joe Guzzardi

For immigration lawyers, these are heady times! Since January 2021, when the Biden regime moved into the White House, the Department of Homeland Security has, by Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ own shameless admission, released 836,000 illegal aliens into the interior. The staggering total includes 398,861 let go since October 1, the fiscal year’s start, and also counts 80,116 admitted in March alone. Excluded are the got-aways; estimates vary, but several hundred thousand fall into that category. This astounding admissions’ total exceeds the population of each of the cities of San Francisco, Denver, Seattle, Boston and Washington, D.C., and each of the states of Wyoming and Vermont.

Imagine the eager anticipation the immigration lawyer community must have when thinking of the fees those aliens might generate! At some firms, $1,000 an hour buys only a preliminary consultation. And the good times will keep on rolling! Once Biden removes Title 42, as he’s determined to do, an estimated 18,000 aliens are likely to cross into the United States daily, most in need of legal counsel.

Enterprising immigration lawyers could make a handsome living from Haitian alien applicants alone. Most Haitians, like others eagerly awaiting their post-Title 42 admissions, will apply for asylum. But a considerable percentage of Haitians who will file claims have already been granted asylum from South American nations like Chile, and have been long-time residents of those countries. But for the Haitians/Chileans, Biden’s lure to foreign nationals to live in America is irresistible. On their trip north, after reaching the bridge at Del Rio, Texas, the duplicitous Haitians/Chileans ditched their asylum documents into the river. The low-risk, but nevertheless fraudulent effort to eliminate any clue that they had already been granted asylum by a democratic, stable country may pay off one day with U.S. citizenship.

Border Admissions Staggering Mayorkas Admits
DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas

Unbeknownst to the general public, asylum fraud is one of the biggest hoaxes in a U.S. immigration system where almost anything goes. The simple words “credible fear” spoken to an immigration official can be the first step to life in the U.S. Few, however, are fleeing true persecution or life-threatening violence. They’ve been coached, often by the smugglers to whom they’ve paid thousands of dollars, to say the magic words that will bring them, figuratively speaking, the keys to the U.S. kingdom.

The harsh reality is that among the thousands assembled at the border, and the thousands more on the way, few legally qualify for asylum. They are economic migrants seeking to improve their lives, and not as the Refugee Act of 1980 spelled out, persons with a well-established fear of persecution “on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.”

Under the current administration, as voters head to the mid-term polling places, knowing the difference between refugees and legitimate asylum seekers is important. Refugees are – or were until Biden allowed admissions to mostly unscreened Afghans and Ukrainians – screened in depth before coming to the U.S. If found wanting, they can be denied refugee status before they step foot into this country. On the other hand, aliens who enter illegally and falsely claim “credible fear” have not been vetted or have been only superficially screened before physically entering the U.S. The current process is easily vulnerable to fraud and abuse. Fraudulent asylum cases, in addition to generous benefits given to those who may not deserve them, undermine and delay processing legitimate appeals from individuals who truly have credible fear.

The soaring numbers of migrants whether they’ve legally or illegally entered the country is a preliminary total. Once inside the U.S., chain migration – immigration’s major source – will increase the number by at least a factor of three. In 2018, The New York Times published a remarkable, but unexaggerated, story about one-single Indian immigrant who arrived in 1968 at age 23, and 50 years later, counts 90 family members who have joined him. Consider too that many of the resettled migrants will either add to their existing families or begin new ones.

Since citizens fund every penny of the migrants’ multiple and costly resettlement expenses, Americans justifiably wonder why, assuming border enforcement, they’re forced to underwrite their gradual but inevitable displacement.

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

Biden Immigration Parole Circumvents The Law

Biden Immigration Parole Circumvents The Law

By Joe Guzzardi

Twenty years ago, journalist Michelle Malkin wrote a column titled, “The Deportation Abyss: It Ain’t over ‘til the Alien Wins.” Written post-9/11, the nation yearned as it still does for a strict deportation strategy and for vigorous immigration law enforcement.

At the beginning of her commentary, Malkin quoted the late Barbara Jordan, a Texas Democrat who served in the U.S. House of Representatives and chaired the U.S. Commission on Immigration reform from 1993 to 1996. Jordan said, “The credibility of immigration policy can be measured by a simple yardstick: people who should get in, get in; people who should not enter are kept out; and people who are judged deportable should be required to leave.”

Jordan’s sensible immigration guidelines were ignored. Too many loopholes in the immigration system, too many squishy congressional representatives, too many lax immigration judges and too many spineless Board of Immigration Appeals’judges undermined legitimate deportations of criminals, including convicted murderers, sex predators, drunken drivers and aggravated felons, subverting Jordan’s sound solutions. Information on how to dodge immigration enforcement was readily available. The soup-to-nuts legal directory that advises aliens who “got trouble” is still operating 20 years later, doubtlessly thriving, and dispensing advice on how to avoid deportation.

In her worst nightmare, Jordan could not have imagined that a U.S. president would not only be inviting millions of illegal aliens from all around the world to come to American, but then rewarding them with air transportation, housing, food, mobile phones and, eventually, one of the most coveted documents that migrants seek from the instant they depart their homeland, employment authorization cards.

Biden is determined to undermine American workers with his reckless abandonment of border security, and his messaging to foreign nationals from around the globe that, despite DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ protestations to the contrary, the border is open. The odds are extremely high that foreign nationals who get to the border will gain entrance. Parole may await them. At least, it’s the administration’s coveted goal to illegally grant parole to foreign nationals that don’t qualify for what should be a rarely approved immigration status.

Biden Immigration Parole Circumvents The Law

Since the mainstream media tosses the word parole around loosely, knowing exactly who merits the status is important to understanding the administration’s deport-no-one intentions. Writing for the Center for Immigration Studies where he’s a Senior Legal Fellow, former DHS Deputy General Counsel George Fishman, in an article “The Pernicious Perversion of Parole: the 70-year battle between Congress and the President,” explained parole’s proper place in immigration law. As Fishman’s title suggests, the decades-long battle has been mostly a lost cause for Congress and immigration restrictionists.

Parole’s history dates back to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 which contained a provision that allowed discretionary power to the Attorney General to parole into the U.S. temporarily under such conditions as the AG may prescribe for emergent reasons or for reasons deemed strictly in the public interest any alien applying for admission to the U. S. All parole grantees are issued on a case-by-case basis, and cannot be granted en masse. (Emphasis added.)

In 1956, Republican Dwight Eisenhower became the first president to violate parole regulations when he permitted Hungarian refugees to enter en masse. Prior to 1956, parole authority had been used only to benefit individual aliens. But as Professors Adam Cox of the University of Chicago Law School and Cristina Rodriguez of New York University correctly concluded, presidents have used powers expressly delegated to them by Congress to advance their own immigration agenda in a manner that accomplished personal objectives Congress almost certainly did not intend and expanding or repurposing Congress’s original design.(Emphasis added.)

Parole should be granted only under the five following conditions: 1) for a medical emergency, 2) for organ donation to a family member, 3) to visit a family member whose death is imminent, 4) for an alien who has assisted U.S. law enforcement and whose presence is needed by the government or whose life is threatened or 5) for criminal prosecution.

Biden’s flagrant use of parole to admit thousands of aliens into the U.S. proves that Malkin’s thesis – the alien always wins – is truer today than ever. Many thousands more aliens remain gathered at or on the way to the border, confident that parole will be their easy ticket into the U.S.

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

Biden Immigration Parole Circumvents The Law

DiMaggios Credited Mom With Their Successes

DiMaggios Credited Mom With Their Successes

By Joe Guzzardi 

Rosalie Mercurio DiMaggio, a Sicilian immigrant, bore nine children, three of whom became Major League center fielders. Since the boys’ father, San Francisco fisherman Giuseppe, considered baseball a “a bum’s game,” Rosalie covered for the Vince, Dominic and Joe Jr. so they could practice with other local boys. Then and now, the Bay Area was a hotbed of baseball talent that included Barry Bonds, Billy Martin, Keith Hernandez, Gil McDougald, seven-time All-Star Joe Cronin, and four-time AL batting champion Harry Heilmann.

Around San Francisco, scouts determined that, of the three brothers, Joe had the best bat; Dom, the best arm; and Vince, who wanted to become an opera singer, the best voice. Joe’s baseball achievements are legendary – his 56-game hitting streak, three MVP awards and his nine World Series championship rings. During the streak, the nation was obsessed with whether “Joltin’ Joe” had gotten a hit that day. An Army Air Force veteran, Joe soon became the talk of Hollywood and the national gossip sheets when he married screen starlet Marilyn Monroe.

DiMaggios Credited Mom With Their Successes
Joe DiMaggio with parents Roaslie and Giuseppi

For years after his Yankee career ended, DiMaggio remained an icon. Paul Simon’s 1968 hit song, “Mrs. Robinson,” contained this lyric which suggested that the nation yearned for the simpler America that DiMaggio represented: “Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio; a nation turns its lonely eyes to you.” DiMaggio’s reaction to the song: “What the hell does it mean?”

Dom, too, is well-known in the baseball world. For a decade, he ably flanked Ted Williams in the Boston Red Sox outfield, and hit with the best of them. An effective lead-off hitter, the “Little Professor,” so called because he was 5’9”, 160 lbs. and wore rimless spectacles, batted .300 four times, led the AL in runs twice and in triples and stolen bases once each. Dom also led AL center fielders in assists three times and in putouts and double plays twice each; he tied a league record by recording 400 putouts four times, and his 1948 totals of 503 putouts and 526 total chances stood as AL records for nearly 30 years.

Post-baseball, Dom founded several small companies that eventually merged into the Delaware Valley Corporation, a family-owned business still operational today. But despite teammate Ted Williams’ vigorous lobbying, Dom’s career stats, .298 average and 1,680 hits, they haven’t gotten him elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame’s veterans’ wing.

Vince, the oldest brother, had less plate success, but was more adept with his glove. He led the National League in strikeouts six times, and set what was then a single season record, 134 Ks for the Boston Bees in 1938. Vince compiled modest 10-year NL career stats with the Pirates, Reds, Phillies Bees and Giants: .249, 125 HRs and 584 RBIs. But Vince had a cannon arm, and said, immodestly, “Joe was a better batter, but I could play rings around him as far as knowledge of the game and plays in the outfield. I could smoke those throws. If you put a dime on second base, I could hit it from the outfield.”

In 1946, after splitting the season with the Phillies and Giants, Vince hung up his spikes, and meandered from one unassuming job to another – Fuller Brush salesman, milk truck delivery driver, and waiter at the family restaurant, DiMaggio’s Grotto on Fisherman’s Wharf. At the restaurant, customers urged Vince to sing. Without hesitation, Vince broke out in his tenor voice to sing operatic arias or popular love ballads. During those happy moments when Vince crooned to his customers, he rued his decision to play baseball instead of pursuing opera.

Vince, Joe and Dom were distant brothers, and often spent years-long periods when they rarely spoke. In a late-life interview, Vince said, “When the folks were alive, we were a lot closer.”

Rosalie was the DiMaggio family’s unifying force, always looking out for her children’s best interests. In their youth, Rosalie read Bible stories and set a high standard for moral behavior. At Rosalie’s insistence, the family moved from Martinez, Calif., to San Francisco. A school teacher in Sicily, Rosalie knew that the city had better schools; she wanted her children to have good educations, a benefit she knew would pay dividends throughout their lives. As Joe’s career was peaking, Rosalie traveled by train to New York to watch the Yankees. Once, she caught reporters off guard when she complained that the city was “boring,” and offered little to do. The truth was that Rosalie missed hearth and home.

In 1986, Dom convinced estranged brothers Vince and Joe to join him at a Fenway Park Old-Timers’ Game. A few months later Vince, whose final years were spent as a born-again Christian, died from colon cancer.

Joe was never out of the limelight. He appeared on television as a pitchman for New York’s Bowery Savings Bank and Mr. Coffee. Thereafter, the Yankee Clipper made occasional appearances at celebrity golf outings, card shows and Old-Timers’ games, where the public address announcer introduced him as “Baseball’s greatest living player.” After Marilyn’s death, Joe organized her funeral to ensure that it wouldn’t be besieged by autograph hounds, or craven Hollywood types. He ordered roses placed at her crypt twice a week. Always a chain smoker, in 1999, Joe died at home of lung cancer.

Dom, in addition to his business successes, cofounded the Boston Patriots AFL football franchise, and the BoSox Club, a fan organization that brings closer contact between the Red Sox’ players and the community. Dom died at age 92 after a bout with pneumonia.

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

DiMaggios Credited Mom With Their Successes DiMaggios Credited Mom With Their Successes

White House Deaf To Immigration Alarm Bells

White House Deaf To Immigration Alarm Bells

By Joe Guzzardi

Showing complete indifference to his party’s fate, President Joe Biden is doing all he can to damage Democrats’ chances for election in the upcoming mid-terms and his re-election in 2024. Biden’s resolute determination to harm the Democrats may be explained several ways. At age 79, Biden has achieved his lifelong goal of becoming president. After at least two failed efforts in 1988 and 2008, and possibly a third failure, depending on how the facts are interpreted from 1984, Biden is finally in the White House.

Another possible explanation is that Biden knows Democratic leadership considers him, at best, inconsequential, and that Barack Obama is still embraced as the party’s hero. Biden has no reason to care about his fellow Democrats’ fate if they’re indifferent to him. At a White House event to celebrate Obamacare’s 12th anniversary, Biden wandered alone and aimlessly as his apathetic Democratic colleagues flocked giddily around Obama. But perhaps the most obvious reason explains everything. At age 79, Biden is too old to care about his 2024 political future. He’s climbed the White House Mountain; no taller summit remains to conquer.

White House Deaf To Immigration Alarm Bells

Perhaps the best indicator of Biden’s reelection disinterest is his refusal to heed his personal, confidential polling firm’s advice on the key issues that concern the nation, specifically immigration and inflation. A New York Timesarticle, “Biden Received Early Warnings that Inflation and Immigration Could Erode his Support,” shows the president has recklessly and lawlessly pressed ahead on open borders and illegal immigration.

Early on in his presidency, according to the article, Biden enjoyed strong national support, but his favorability quickly eroded as the border crisis intensified. The John Anzalone-headed research team found that because voters feel that Biden and his deputies are clueless when it comes to designing a plan to combat the festering border crisis, immigration represents an intensifying vulnerability for the president. Biden’s failure to slow migration is, the pollsters concluded, “starting to take a toll.” As early as last spring, when trafficked unaccompanied minors strained Health and Human Services capacities, pollsters warned that “immigration is the only issue where the president’s ratings are worse with our targets than with voters overall.” And on July 9, “President Biden continues to hold weaker, negative ratings on two hot-button issues [immigration and crime] that have been recently bubbling up.”

Despite his pollster’s immigration red flags, and the unanimous national consensus that Vice President Kamala Harris’ discover-the-root-causes solution to migration is a bad joke played on U.S. citizens, on May 23, Biden intends to lift Title 42, which has been an important tool in turning away illegal border crossers for health reasons. A Louisiana federal judge’s temporary restraining order that the administration has agreed to honor may delay Title 42’s removal. But if Title 42 is shelved, DHS officials anticipate 18,000 illegal immigrants a day will flood the border.

DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced what he optimistically labeled as a plan to cope with the historic surge. The costly concept includes spending more taxpayer money on medical support, and more funding for air and ground transportation to release the migrants into the interior from the border. As a footnote to its plan, DHS added that it will use Expedited Removal more frequently. Border agents scoff at the mere suggestion that ER will be a useful tool. Once aliens claim fear of persecution if returned home, an ER converts to a notice to appear which migrants rarely honor. Migrants are spreading the word among each other that the keys to getting U.S. residency are the words, “Fear of Persecution.”

The Times story misses the point, perhaps purposely, about Biden and his cronies. The administration didn’t need to pay taxpayer funds to a professional pollster to advise it that Americans are unhappy. Biden et al don’t care. The arrival of mostly poor, unskilled, limited English-speaking aliens from 150 nations through mass immigration is a fundamental elitist goal. While the 2022 mid-terms and congressional control may be at risk in the short-term, the long-term picture that will erase the middle-class and end American sovereignty looks rosy to the Biden administration.


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

White House Deaf To Immigration Alarm Bells

Simply Have No Border Left Say Sheriffs

Simply Have No Border Left Say Sheriffs

By Joe Guzzardi

During March, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reported 221,303 migrant encounters, a 33 percent increase over March 2021. The 221,303 figure represents the highest monthly total in 22 years, and pushes the aggregate fiscal year number to 1.2 million, and 2.5 million since President Biden’s inauguration day.

The border surgers included single adults, family units and unaccompanied children who spiked to 14,167 March encounters compared with February’s 11,984. More alarming is that the world has gotten the message: show up at the border, and the Biden administration will welcome you. While once mostly limited to Mexico and the Northern Triangle, migrants now come from 150 countries, including Cuba, Haiti, Brazil, Venezuela, Albania, Romania and Ecuador.

Simply Have No Border Left Say Sheriffs

Among this year’s 221,303 March encounters, 109,549, or about half, were processed for removal under Title 42 which allows the U.S. to remove foreign nationals who are considered a public health risk. Through the third week in March, CBP expelled 1.7 million illegal immigrants under Title 42. Imagine, then, the unimaginable – what conditions, first at the border, and then in interior, will be like if Biden, defying logic as he’s determined to do – ends Title 42 on May 23.

The post-Title 42 estimates on illegal immigrant border crossings are frightening. Apprehensions could rise to 18,000 a day, more than half a million a month, and 6 million annually. Fortunately, U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana Judge Robert Summerhays issued a temporary restraining order to block Biden’s decision to end Title 42 expulsions until arguments for a more formal injunction can be heard. On May 9, Summerhays’ order will expire.

Biden & Co. are pressing on with their open border agenda, but without a thought about what happens next to the migrants and to the U.S. citizens who subsidize the foreign nationals’ relocation. Eagle Pass, Texas, the entry point for hundreds of border crossers, is indicative of what lays ahead for some cities. Airports and bus stations can’t keep up with the demand. Migrants have nowhere to go, day or night. They hang out in large clusters, and sleep on the street. Biden couldn’t care less that the 29,000 Eagle Pass legal residents’ lives have been disrupted, and their personal safety is at risk amidst the chaos. Mayor Rolando Salinas said: “This border issue – it’s a mess.”

Census Bureau data shows that Eagle Pass is 97 percent Hispanic, has a 58 percent labor participation rate, a $46,000 median household income, and a $19,000 annual per capita income. Biden should be concerned about the adverse effect mass immigration will have not only on Eagle Pass, but the nation’s 37 million residents who live below the poverty line. Open borders facilitate importing poverty, a condition the U.S. already has an abundance of.

Compare Eagle Pass residents to the lifestyles of the open borders architects. Biden owns two Delaware homes and has a $9 million net worth. Vice President Kamala Harris, the border czar, is married to Hollywood entertainment lawyer Douglas Emhoff. The couple share houses in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. and enjoy a $6 million net worth.

Although Mayorkas was born in Cuba, he’s been in the U.S. since age one, and lived a privileged life. He grew up in Beverly Hills, went to Beverly Hills High School, attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a B.A. degree with distinction in 1981. Then, in 1985, Mayorkas received his J.D. from Loyola Law School. The DHS secretary lives comfortably in D.C. and has an estimated net worth of about $3 million. Unliked Eagle Pass citizens, the welcome-to-the-world trio is wealthy, and set for life.

Elites like Biden, Harris and Mayorkas are responsible for sound governance, and not jeopardizing Americans’ jobs, public school educations, security and access to prompt emergency medical care. Mass immigration will flood the jobs market with cheap labor, create overcrowd public schools, strain law enforcement, and add to hospital staffing workloads. But over-immigration’s consequences will never personally affect Biden, Harris or Mayorkas.

The National Sheriffs’ Association sent a letter to Senate leaders to share its front-line views. In the letter, Jonathan Thompson, the organization’s Executive Director and CEO, wrote: “We simply have no border left in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, or Southern California.” Erasing the border has been Biden’s goal since his first day as president, the sheriffs concluded. After 15 months in office, and to the dismay of Americans, Biden has achieved his goal.
 

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

Simply Have No Border Left Say Sheriffs

Panama Betrayal, Mayorkas, Blinken Scheme for More Illegal Migration

Panama Betrayal, Mayorkas, Blinken Scheme for More Illegal Migration

By Joe Guzzardi

In anticipation of regaining a congressional majority after the 2022 mid-term elections, GOP leaders are drafting the game plan to help them achieve their goal. Not surprisingly, the Biden administration and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ immigration actions since Inauguration Day sit atop the checklist of items that Republicans consider ripest for criticism. A 60-page Guidance Memo drafted by Ohio U.S. Representative Jim Jordan and posted on his Twitter page emphasizes Democrats’ immigration vulnerabilities, especially the sieve-like open border that’s certain to worsen when Title 42 is removed.
 
Mayorkas admits that “significant challenges” will arise once Title 42 is lifted. But the DHS Secretary insists that his department is ready to meet the inevitable illegal immigration spike which he created. Speaking in Panama City at a ministerial conference on migration and protection and accompanied by Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, Mayorkas’ comments are best summarized as happy talk with destructive undertones that will irreversibly harm the United States.
 
At no time did Mayorkas speak with credibility about ending the illegal immigration surge through stronger border and interior security, or stepped-up deportation. Instead, Mayorkas identified his solution to the immigration challenges he correctly foresees as inevitable to include building “legal, orderly, and humane pathways so individuals do not need to place their lives, their well-beings, the well-beings of their loved ones in the hands of smugglers and traffickers who only seek to exploit them for profit.”

Panama Betrayal

Blinken doubled down on Mayorkas’ so-called solution with nation-busting ideas of his own on how to manage, not end, migration. Said Blinken: “Here in Panama, we [the 22 nations represented] talked about some of the most urgent aspects of this issue, including helping stabilize and strengthen communities that are hosting migrants and refugees; creating more legal pathways to reinforce safe, orderly, and humane migration.” He added, speaking for himself and his craven administration, but not for U.S. voters, that finding a solution to illegal immigration is a U.S. “priority.” Translation: More immigration that U.S. taxpayers oppose but will fund as they watch, helpless and voiceless, in the nation’s destruction.
 
The total disregard for immigration law that Biden, Mayorkas, Blinken, Vice President Kamala Harris and others too numerous to mention have demonstrated over the last 15 months raises the point that, given open borders, DHS is pointless and should be dismantled. The department’s $52.2 billion budget is a waste, and too many of its 240,000 employees, starting at the top, have as their mission America’s subversion.
 
Enacted after 9/11 to protect the nation, DHS and the programs that it spawned – the Transportation Security Administration, the Visa Security Program, the terrorist screening database and the no fly list – are meaningless when unidentified foreign nationals can walk at will across the Southwest border, surrender to immigration agents and then be transported across the country secure in the knowledge that they’ll never be removed.
 
Based on camera traffic, drone traffic and sensor traffic that border patrol records but that the Biden administration prohibits responding to, in March, 67,000 gotaways entered the U.S. which brings the administration’s post-inauguration total to about 700,000. DHS doesn’t know and could care less where the gotaways are or what their intentions may be.
 
Capitol Hill scuttlebutt is gaining steam that should the Republicans prevail in November, a Mayorkas impeachment might be the party’s first matter of business. Given Mayorkas’ disregard for immigration law and public safety, an impeachment case against him is mandatory if sovereign American is to be saved.

PFIR analyst Joe Guzzardi writes about immigration issues and impacts.
Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org. Subscribe to joeguzzardi.substack.com.

Panama Betrayal, Mayorkas, Blinken Scheme for More Illegal Migration

Panama Betrayal
 

Bert Shepard Was A One-Legged WWII Hero who Pitched for Washington Senators

Bert Shepard Was A One-Legged WWII Hero who Pitched for Washington Senators

By Joe Guzzardi

Between August 1 and August 5, 1945, the Washington Senators played five consecutive double headers. In a normal season, a scheduling burden of that magnitude wouldn’t have mattered much to the lowly Senators. But in 1945, the “first in love, first in war, and last in the American League” Senators were in a neck-and-neck pennant race with the Detroit Tigers.

The Senators won nine of the 10 double header games, losing the August 4 night cap 15-4 to the Boston Red Sox. Motivated by the lopsided score, and unwilling to stretch his exhausted pitching staff further, Senators’ manager Ossie Bluege summoned his lefty Lt. Bert Shepard to the mound. In his Baseball in Wartime account of Shepard’s heroism, Gary Bedingfield wrote that on his 34th European Theater mission and while his P-38J Lightening was bombing an airfield near Ludwigslust, east of Hamburg, Shepard’s plane was hit by enemy flak. The shells blew Shepard’s foot off and tore through his right leg. Shepard: “I could feel my foot coming loose at the boot.” The 55th Fighter Group’s pilot’s plane hit the ground at an estimated 380 mph.

Angry German farmers rushed out of their homes, wielding pitchforks, determined to kill Shepard, the American enemy. Luckily for Shepard, First Lieutenant Ladislaus Loidl, a physician in the German Luftwaffe, saw the wreckage’s smoke, and hurried to the site in time to hold off the incensed farmers. Loidl drove the critically injured Shepard to a hospital, but the “terror flyer” wasn’t allowed admittance. Eventually another hospital accepted patient Shepard, and his leg was amputated 11-inches below his knee. After recuperating, Shepard spent the next eight months in POW camps where a Canadian medic and fellow prisoner made Shepard a crude artificial leg from scrap iron, wood and rivets.

Slowly, Shepard, who as a youth moved from Indiana to California to play semi-pro baseball, began tossing the bulb around to get back a baseball’s feel. In California, Shepard’s skills were good enough to land contracts first with the Chicago White Sox and then the St. Louis Cardinals. His goal before and after his life-threatening WWII injuries was to pitch major league baseball.

A prisoner exchange returned Shepard to the U.S., and he was helped along the way to achieving his lifelong dream. At Walter Reed Hospital, Shepard met with Under Secretary of War Robert Patterson who asked about his future plans. Without hesitation, Shepard replied “to play baseball.” A skeptical but impressed Patterson contacted his friend and Senators’ owner Clark Griffith who agreed to give Shepard, now fitted with a new prothesis, a look.

As Shepard recalled, “Mr. Griffith did it out of sympathy more than anything.” But pitching in exhibition games, Shepard impressed – “got ‘em out each time,” he said. On the strength of his outstanding spring training, the Senators offered Shepard a contract with the promise that once he mastered his control, he’d be given a roster spot.

On August 4, Shepard’s big moment arrived. With the Senators getting hammered in game two 14-2 in the fourth inning and with the bases loaded, manager Bluege signaled for Shepard who promptly struck out George Metkovich for the last out. The 13,000 assembled fans, who had followed Shepard’s progress through the nonstop media coverage of the war hero’s progress, rose to their feet to applaud. Over the next five innings, Shepard surrendered only one run on three hits, and fielded his position flawlessly.

In a perfect world, Shepard’s saga would have continued to include his promotion to the starting rotation where he would have helped carry the Senators past the Tigers to win the AL pennant, and then defeat the Chicago Cubs in the October Classic. But the world is imperfect, and 5-1/3 innings with a 1.69 ERA were Shepard’s career MLB totals.

Bert Shepard Was A One-Legged WWII Hero who Pitched for Washington Senators

Bluege, hoping to eke out the AL flag from the Tigers, decided to finish the year with his established starters. In 1946, players returned from active WWII duty; Shepard didn’t make the team, but was offered a coaching job. Bored, Shepard asked to be sent to the minors where he pitched for several years at Chattanooga, Waterbury and Modesto. Along his minor league journey, Shepard returned to Walter Reed to have more of his leg amputated.

April is Limb Loss and Limb Difference Awareness month, and the Amputee Coalition is an organization that would celebrate Shepard’s rewarding life that included the Distinguished Flying Cross and Air Metal awards. Before he died in 2008 at age 87, Shepard worked as a Hughes Aircraft safety engineer and an IBM typewriter salesman, played in golf tournaments with his buddy New York Yankee shortstop Phil Rizzuto, and walked 18-hole golf courses. He flew his own plane to visit amputees across the nation. Part of Shepard’s visits included encouraging demonstrations like effortlessly running the 60-yard dash and dribbling a basketball. In his later years, Shepard advocated for amputee workers’ rights and designed an artificial ankle that allowed those with severe leg injuries like his more mobility.

Shepard’s remarkable story of perseverance and achievement has a heart-warming footnote. For years, Shepard wondered about the German physician who saved his life in Germany, “Who carried me from the wreck? Who saved my life?” In May 1993, a third party arranged a meeting between Dr. Loidl and Shepard. After they met, an emotionally overwhelmed Shepard said: “I prayed for this. And after half a century, my dream has incredibly come true.”

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

Bert Shepard Was A One-Legged WWII Hero who Pitched for Washington Senators

Bert Shepard

Better H-1B Visa Is On All Thinking Persons Wishlist

Better H-1B Visa Is On All Thinking Persons Wishlist

By Joe Guzzardi

Polling shows that 72 percent of likely voters think the country is headed in the wrong direction. No other conclusion could possibly be reached. Inflation is up 8.5 percent since March 2021. At the pump, AAA calculates that the average price per gallon is $4.12, compared to $2.86 a year ago. The Southwest Border is a sieve; record high numbers of illegal immigrants, including single adult males and unaccompanied minors, continue to enter at will. Despite White House denials, rumors persist that the U.S. will soon send soldiers to the Ukraine.

Inflation, the porous border and Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine have kept another persistent problem out of the headlines – the continued displacement of qualified U.S. tech workers from their well-paid, white-collar jobs. Attribute the blame to the cheap-labor-addicted employers who significantly underpay their foreign-born workers. In December 2021, an Economic Policy Institute report coauthored by Ron Hira and Daniel Costa found that thousands of skilled migrants with H-1B visas working as HCL Technologies subcontractors at well-known corporations like Disney, FedEx and Google have been underpaid by at least $95 million. The victims are the underpaid H-1B employees, the displaced U.S. tech workers and others in related fields whose working conditions are downgraded when employment-based visa workers are underpaid without consequence.

For more than 30 years since the Immigration Act of 1990 created the H-1B visa, Congress has winked at users’ rule-bending year after year. By ignoring the deeply rooted problems in how the H-1B employment-based visa is acquired, Congress invites more of the same manipulation. To wit, during 2022’s first few months, criminal charges were filed against Bay Area fraudsters – two pairs of two individuals each – who gamed the complex H-1B rules for substantial financial gain.

The first case occurred in February when federal government officials accused two South Bay residents, Namrata Patnaik and Kartiki Parekh, of submitting 85 fraudulent H-1B visa applications. The visa scam was linked to other crimes that eventually led to $7 million in ill-gotten gains. The indictment charged that from 2011 through April 2017 Patnaik and Parekh submitted the duplicitous applications for foreign workers sponsored by PerfectVIPs, a San Jose-based semiconductor company. The company CEO was Patnaik, and the human resources manager, Parekh. Patnaik laundered proceeds of the visa fraud. In all, the indictment included three counts of visa fraud and one count of money laundering.

The second case, perpetrated by Elangovan Punniakoti and Mary Christeena over the decade that ended in 2020, involved 54 fraudulent H-1B visa applications that were sponsored by an IT staffing firm, Innovate Solutions. Punniakoti and Christeena were chief executive officer and president, respectively. The accused swindlers also were responsible for stating in applications that a foreign worker would be working on an internal project for Innovate Solutions, despite knowing that no such project existed. Visa fraud and money laundering carry ten-year, or longer, prison sentences, and hefty six-figure fines.

Better H-1B Visa Is On All Thinking Persons Wishlist

The solutions to a more functional H-1B visa, or at least guidelines to the remedies, may sound straightforward, but would be difficult to put into effect. The powerful, deep-pockets Silicon Valley lobby has Congress wrapped around its little finger. Nevertheless, here are a few starting points to consider should a pro-American worker Congress take over in 2022: end the current lottery, and replace it with a merit-based system. Specifically and unequivocally define what task a specialty worker performs to prevent marginal workers with average skills from taking an American’s job, and strengthen the Department of Homeland Security’s onsite enforcement powers so that agents can assure that an H-1B worker is actually performing the job identified on his application.

More important, end the H-1B’s dual-intent feature that allows what should be temporary workers – nonimmigrant workers – to apply for a permanent Green Card. And most important, to remove the well-earned, accurate perception that the U.S. government sanctions modern day, indentured servitude labor conditions, take control of the H-1B visa away from the employer. As the H-1B regulations currently stand, the employee is beholden to his employer because he, the employer, controls the visa and therefore foreign-born workers’ immigration status. If, in the employer’s view, the employee isn’t toeing the company line, whatever it may be, the employer can threaten him with a call to DHS, and recommend removal.

The wish list for cleaning up the H-1B visa is long, and while the Biden administration is in the White House, a pipe dream. But for GOP optimists who are looking ahead to November, and envision stumping on American job creation, an H-1B overhaul that benefits U.S. workers would be a good platform to adopt.

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

Better H-1B Visa Is On All Thinking Persons Wishlist

American Workers Available Despite Labor Shortage Wailing

American Workers Available Despite Labor Shortage Wailing

By Joe Guzzardi

Depending on who is asked, the Southwest border invasion represents either sovereign America’s demise or the long-awaited answer to a national crisis. For citizens who watch the nightly news and see a flood of foreign nationals pouring over the border, then released into the general public, the imagery is deeply disturbing. But for the Chamber of Commerce, some employers and the establishment media, the U.S. needs more immigration, not controlled borders. In their eyes, the arriving migrants represent a labor market boost that will end the alleged too-few-workers mantra that dominates the business news cycle.

In her op-ed titled “Democrats Are Missing the Bigger Immigration Picture,” The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell argued that more, not fewer, illegal immigrants should be President Biden’s goal. Rampell’s reasoning: the migrants “can fill critical labor market shortages.”

Not surprisingly, the economy, at least as it pertains to filling “critical labor market shortages,” is the exact opposite of how Rampell and other immigration advocates alarmingly describe the situation. The U.S. has a significant overage of potential 16-64 employment-age workers not in the labor force. The problem is that they’re sitting at home.

American Workers Available Despite Labor Shortage Wailing

In their March 2022 analysis of the unemployment and labor force participation among foreign and U.S. born that drew from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Current Population Survey (CPS) data, Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) researchers Steven Camarota and Karen Zeigler found that the labor force participation rate, 62.4 percent in March, has been in steep, long-term decline for decades. The fourth quarter of 2021 showed that only 73.2 percent of the working, U.S.-born were in the labor force compared to 77.3 percent in 2000. If labor force participation had remained the same in 2021 as it was in 2000, the researchers concluded, nearly 7 million more U.S.-born Americans would have been in the labor force in 2021.

The labor force participation decline is especially pronounced among the U.S.-born without a bachelor’s degree. Adding mostly unskilled, undereducated migrants with limited English skills, who appear to be the majority among the arriving aliens, would represent more job competition, and ultimately more unemployment for noncollege-educated Americans, particularly already underserved blacks, Hispanics and other minorities.

For decades, working age men have been disappearing from the labor force at record rates. In 1965, the participation rate for prime-age workers ages 25-54 was 96.6 percent – almost all adult men worked. Today, the reported participation rate is about 89.3 percent which means that, based on today’s prime-age 25-54 male population of 64.5 million, only 57.6 million prime-age men are working or actively looking for work – labor force-attached in BLS terms. About 6.9 million men are, therefore, neither working nor looking for work. Conclusion: despite advocates’ hue and cry for more foreign-born labor, millions of potential domestic workers are available; employers must pay fair wages, and offer competitive employment conditions.

The side effects of such a large nonworking adult population are many; all of them bad. People need work to maintain self-esteem and to gain a sense of community involvement. Joblessness has contributed to an increase in domestic abusebetween intimate partners and to alcohol dependency. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warned that excessive alcohol consumption is responsible for more than 95,000 deaths in the U.S. each year, or 261 deaths per day. These deaths shorten the lives of those who die by an average of almost 29 years or a total of 2.8 million years of potential life lost. Alcoholism is a leading cause of preventable death in the U.S.

Drug-related deaths are at a record high; unemployment is a significant drug dependency risk factor. More than 100,000 people in the U.S. died of drug overdoses between May 2020 and April 2021, according to the CDC. This is an increase of 28 percent from the previous April 2019 to April 2020 period. Unemployment is also a variable in the rising homelessness population. If heads of households are unemployed for long periods, intergenerational poverty can become a long-term consequence. A child’s economic future is most often determined by his living circumstances until he reaches age 23.

The link between the border and U.S. jobs is inexorable. The CIS research team found that since 2000, legal and illegal immigration has added 8.8 million workers. Many in Congress advocate for more international workers even though millions of Americans are available to hire and, because they’re unemployed, are struggling financially and emotionally. Advocacy that ignores unemployment’s deadly consequences is misinformed, self-serving and dishonest.


Guzzardi writes about immigration issues and impacts for PFIR from Pennsylvania. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org. Subscribe at joeguzzardi.substack.com.

Immigration Overages Hurt All In Era Of Shortages

Immigration Overages Hurt All In Era Of Shortages

By Joe Guzzardi

In Congress, an inverse relationship exists between the numbers of border crossers and a discussion about how millions of new migrants will be cared for. The greater the numbers, the less is said about open borders and the resultant negative long-term population consequences.

A report from the border indicates that immigration agents stopped about 7,100 worldwide migrants each day during a recent week. Department of Homeland Security officials predict that fiscal 2022 migration totals will surpass last year’s 2 million, plus an estimated 1,000-a-day “gotaways.” Once Title 42 is eliminated, the illegal alien surge will intensify because agents won’t be allowed to return migrants to Mexico based on COVID-19 grounds.

President Biden and those who advise him have privately agreed – they wouldn’t dare make a public announcement – that open borders are okay with them. In this era of shortages in oil and affordable housing and of supply chain disruptions causing product shortages everywhere, what will happen next to the migrants and to the U.S. environment after they settle? Limits to population growth exist, but are a taboo subject in Congress. Remember also that immigrants have multiplier factors like chain migration and increasing family size or starting new family units that must eventually be provided for.

Consider the most fundamental natural resource need that everyone requires: water, and the nationwide dire shortage of it. The National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, in partnership with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, has created the U.S. Drought Monitor that maps nationwide drought conditions and maintains historical drought records. Ranked according to drought severity, the top seven states include four that are primary migrant destinations: Arizona, New Mexico, California and Texas.

As of March, 90 percent of Texas is experiencing drought conditions with High Plains residents suffering from extreme drought. Forecasters warn that drought conditions could worsen, and some predict the possibility of unprecedented 10-year megadroughts that will bring hotter, drier and more extreme weather than normally seen. The University of Texas and its Environmental Institute analyzed the state’s water crisis and the probability of it expanding. Identified as one of the major contributors to water shortage was population growth. Texas’ population is expected to increase from today’s 29.5 million people to 51 million by 2070, with the majority residing in urban areas. Inarguably, the more people added to Texas’ population, the more difficult it becomes to overcome water shortage challenges.

The expected Texas population increase of 21 million people in less than 50 years is part of the U.S. total population growth of 70 million, to 404 million, during the same half decade. All will be daily consumers of water in multiple ways.

Those calling for increased immigration forget that growth is finite. Sir David Attenborough, the natural history filmmaker and biologist who advocated halving immigration into the United Kingdom to preserve as much of the landscape as possible once said, “I’ve never seen a problem that wouldn’t be easier to solve with fewer people, or harder, and ultimately impossible, with more.” Attenborough could have mentioned that water supply is an impossible-to-solve problem for any area when there are no limits to population growth.


PFIR analyst Joe Guzzardi writes about immigration issues and impacts. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org. Subscribe to his columns at joeguzzardi.substack.com.

Immigration Overages Hurt All In Era Of Shortages