Category: Joe Guzzardi

Border Failures Grow Population

By Joe Guzzardi

Among President Biden’s first day Executive Actions is one that promised to tackle climate change, a primary concern of Congress. Included as part of the Biden administration’s climate change objectives are rejoining the Paris Agreement and leading what the administration called a clean energy revolution that will, by 2035, achieve a carbon pollution-free power sector. On Earth Day 2021, Biden will host a Leaders’ Climate Summit where he’ll emphasize his ambitious agenda.

Biden’s goals are noble, but assuming they’re eventually achievable, they’re down the road. Ever-growing human populations, with their larger carbon footprint, are a big variable in climate change. But Biden is ignoring the current Southwest border crisis that will add tens of thousands of people to the nation’s 330 million residents. The Wall Street Journal reported that, through February, Customs and Border Protection will have taken 9,000unaccompanied minors into custody, an unprecedented crisis. Biden’s administration also announced that it will admit 25,000 asylum seekers held in Mexico.

Making northbound travel more appealing to prospective asylees, Biden ordered Immigration and Customs officials to lay out the red carpet. The federal government is, at taxpayer expense, flying aliens to mainland destinations where their presence, proof of the unpopular border surge with voters, will be less visible. Under Biden, the children and adult asylees will remain in the U.S. indefinitely, raise families and add to the U.S. carbon footprint as automobile, housing and durable goods consumers. When family reunification kicks in, the number of new, settled migrants will increase by a factor of more than 3, the number that Princeton University found represents the average number of immigrants from abroad that will join their stateside relatives. The average U.S. carbon footprint for each individual in the U.S. is 16 tons, among the world’s highest.

Population growth, whether created through natural increases by births outnumbering deaths or in-migration outpacing out-migration, is, the Census Bureau confirms, the leading cause of the United States’ ever-larger carbon footprint. Regulations like those the Biden administration hopes to put in place cannot negate the nation’s current immigrant intake of more than 1 million annually plus whatever unknown number of illegal aliens successfully cross the border.

During the early 1970s, President Richard Nixon signed several laws aimed at reducing each American’s per capita effect on the environment. Five decades ago, when Nixon was president, the U.S. population was 203 million; today immigration-fueled growth has pushed the nation’s population to 330 million. According to the Census Bureau, the U.S. receives one net international migrant every 666 seconds. The Census Bureau also predicts that by mid-decade, immigration will be the largest contributor to a U.S. population that exceeds 400 million, and will inevitably create a larger carbon footprint.

Whatever legislative changes the Biden administration may rule on in the guise of clean energy and reducing climate change impacts, their positive impacts will be reduced or completely negated by the increased emissions from millions of new people. Research in 2020 from The Journal of Population and Sustainability evaluated 44 countries, including the U.S., and found that emissions arising from population growth between 1990 and 2019 wiped out two-thirds of the emission reductions that arose from greater energy efficiency programs.

Blame Congress, not immigrants. Newly arrived migrants require more urban development – housing, schools, health care, governmental services, streets, parking, waste removal and places to work, shop and worship. The result is more urban sprawl, and its irreversible habitat loss.

In 1996, President Clinton, as part of his “Population and Consumption Task Force Report, President’s Council on Sustainable Development,” urged that immigration be discussed “with sensitivity and care” on behalf of “the American future.” Republicans and Democrats alike have ignored Clinton’s sound advice for 25 years. Their shameful cowardice – they know if they spoke the truth about immigration and population, the public wouldn’t support their agenda – ensured that runaway growth would escalate during those two and a half decades.

Joe Guzzardi has written about immigration, population and the environment for more than 30 years. More @OurCarbonFootprint on FB. Contact Joe at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org.

Border Failures Grow Population

Big Business Endorses Amnesty And So Do The Universities

By Joe Guzzardi

Once again, the big guys, those with money, power and influence, are ganging up on the little guys, Americans struggling in the neverending pandemic shutdown to earn a sustenance-level income.

As is too frequently the case, immigration, and specifically President Biden’s U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021, is the focal point of the ongoing lopsided battle of the elite versus the working classes. At the February 19 New England Business Immigration Summit (NEBIS), Harvard’s president, Lawrence S. Bacow, along with biotech executives and other higher education leaders gathered virtually to urge Congress to pass the amnesty legislation that Biden promised as a candidate.

The group urged Congress to grant citizenship to illegal aliens as well as to deferred action for childhood arrivals and temporary protected status recipients. Conference participants also want the federal government to issue more employment-based visas to overseas workers which President Trump paused because of COVID-19 concerns (still valid), and to restore refugee levels to the pre-Trump totals of 100,000 or more annually.

David Greene, Maine’s Colby College president, said that only an immediate immigrant infusion can save New England. Greene’s statement is an insult to unemployed and underemployed New Englanders. For his part, Bacow wants more opportunities for international students to remain in the U.S. for employment, a consequence that, if realized, would come at the expense of U.S. college graduates.

Whenever big names like NEBIS smooth-talkers get together openly to advocate for more legally present immigrants, an age-old ploy that dates back at least to the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, their objective is to convey to and sway the public that when so many prominent, successful people agree on a single government policy, in this case amnesty, they must be right. After all, an elitist “summit” has rendered its pro-amnesty verdict – case closed!

In truth, immigration expansionist advocates are misguided, and if their encouragement to Congress succeeds, millions of new, lifetime-authorized workers will join the pandemic-crippled, automation-driven economy. To begin with, no one knows the size of the illegal immigrant population that Biden has vowed to reward with amnesty. Former Department of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen admitted on national television that DHS is clueless about whether there are 11 million or 30 million illegal aliens in the U.S. If Nielsen doesn’t know, then nobody does. Even the lowest estimate, 11 million, plus DACAs, TPS and more employment visas would mean that the labor market will be flooded with a minimum of 12 million legal workers who will provide the cheap labor that employers covet.

At NEBIS, David Barber whose family founded Barber Foods, a Maine-based food company, insisted that Maine “doesn’t have enough people to fill their jobs.” In a 2017, $4.2 billion transaction, Tyson Foods acquired Barber Foods’ parent company. Barber’s claim about not enough Mainers to fill jobs is false.

A few years ago, during a similar worker shortage allegation, the Bangor Daily News published a story titled “Amid Foreign Worker Shortage, Bar Harbor Businesses Turn to Local Workers.” Readers reacted with vehemence. They concluded that “after crying for years” about how Maine businesses will fail without the foreign workers used for years to hold down wages, employers now admit that they’ll need to hire locals. Employers should offer higher wages to their neighbors – the traditional solution to filling jobs – before hiring from abroad.

Universities are, like private-sector employers, money-driven. International students who attend public universities pay out-of-state tuition fees that greatly exceed instate tuition. The nearly 1 million foreign-born students, 52 percent Indian and Chinese, enrolled in public colleges contribute to the financial well-being of those institutions. On average, annual out-of-state tuition costs $15,000 more, a gap that grows wider every year.

Historically, an international student who entered the U.S. on an F-1 student visa would return home after graduation. Today, however, the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program allows science, technology, engineering and math students to gain employment in well-paid, white-collar jobs for periods up to three years following graduation. DHS estimates that more than 200,000 F-1 visa holders, about 20 percent of the international student enrollment, are working with OPT authorization. Biden’s amnesty proposes automatically granting a Green Card to every STEM graduate.

Follow the money trail, the old saw, applies to immigration advocacy. Proponents want cheap labor and higher profits, even if those goals hurt Americans. Biden’s amnesty, examined closely, offers nothing to improve Americans’ lives, but is from its first page to the 353rd deliberately calculated to harm.

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.

Big Business Endorses Amnesty And So Do The Universities

Big Business Endorses Amnesty And So Do The Universities

Problem Polls For Biden

By Joe Guzzardi 

Presidential honeymoons have remarkably different lengths. President Barack Obama’s honeymoon, at least with the press, began the day he announced his candidacy, February 10, 2007, and the blissful union continues today. On the complete opposite end of the honeymoon spectrum is President Donald Trump, an impeachment target from before his inauguration in 2017 until February 2021, a month after he left office.

Surprisingly, the polls show that President Joe Biden is, after only four weeks in the White House, having a rough go of it with the very Democrats that helped elect him. The Morning Consult poll, a partnership with the left-leaning journalism company Politico, found that several of Biden’s Executive Orders, especially those immigration-related, are among the most unpopular with voters.

Of the voters polled, only 45 percent support including illegal immigrants in the census, and only 46 percent approve halting the Trump administration’s Remain in Mexico policy which the Biden administration has undone. Effective February 19, the first of an eventual 25,000 migrants will begin entry into the United States. Others entered earlier and illegally were, despite the COVID-19 pandemic, caught and released with orders to appear in immigration court at a later date.

Biden’s lenient immigration policies have encouraged large migrant caravans to come north. As one of thousands of border-bound Hondurans told CNN, Biden is “going to help all of us” to become legal residents. When askedhow the administration could refute the widely held perception that the 100 percent surge increases meant that migrants interpreted that the borders were open, an opinion Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador shares, White House press secretary Jen Psaki avoided giving a straightforward answer.

The least popular among Biden’s Executive Orders is his goal to expand refugee admission to 125,000 from President Trump’s 15,000, a greater than 800 percent increase. Among those polled, 48 percent of voters somewhat or strongly oppose the president’s plan to increase refugee resettlement in the upcoming fiscal year, while 39 percent support it.

Summing up the February 5-7 survey among 1,986 registered voters, and accounting for a 2 percent error margin, Morning Consult’s Senior Editor Cameron Easley wrote that “Orders pertaining to immigration and immigrant rights constitute five of his seven least popular actions among voters, and are particularly animating for Republicans.” As a result, Easley concluded, “immigration will be tricky political territory for the president.”

The nationwide apprehension about Biden’s expansive immigration executive orders is easily understandable. At the border, COVID-untested migrants, their total as yet unknown, have been released into Texas, a development that State Sen. Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa (D-McAllen) called “very alarming.”

From Texas, many migrants enter other states’ general populations, and could put those residents at risk. An anonymous Customs and Border Protection official told local reporters that as per a longstanding practice, when long-term holding solutions become impossible, “some migrants will be processed for removal, provided a Notice to Appear, and released into the U.S. to await a future immigration hearing.” Without identifying catch and release, the anonymous CBP officer identified the process to a tee.

Biden’s proposed refugee intake increase has generated similar concernsabout Americans’ health and safety. Weaker screening and less vetting of international refugees could unnecessarily add to the domestic COVID crisis.

Americans are puzzled at what the thought process may be behind Biden’s Day One urgency to liberalize immigration laws when there’s no link to how his actions help the millions of economically distressed, employment-anxious citizens and lawfully present residents. Biden’s immigration actions will expand the labor pool – the Bureau of Labor Statistics employment-population ratio that measures the number of people employed against the total working-age population is a dismal 57.5 percent.

Biden is urging Congress to pass amnesty that would legalize and provide lifelong valid work permission to millions of aliens, a big gamble for the new president. With only a five-seat margin in the House of Representatives, the Senate tied at 50-50, and with history showing that the mid-term elections cost the majority party about 25 seats, Biden could be, as the Morning Consult poll editor warned, plunging into cold and murky water.


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.

Problem Polls For Biden Problem Polls For Biden

American Workers Brace for Elitists’ Amnesty

By Joe Guzzardi

Congress has announced the details of President Biden’s major amnesty that will reward illegal aliens, the total population of which may be as low as 11 million or as high as 30 million. No one knows.

Among the benefits included in the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021 are what Biden called “a reasonable path to citizenship” for illegal immigrants or in Biden’s preferred parlance, “noncitizens,” a greatly expanded refugee resettlement program, looser asylum regulations, an increase in illegal immigration and an end to President Trump’s public charge rule that prohibits public benefit-dependent immigrants from receiving Green Cards.

For Biden, passing amnesty will be a battle. At-risk 2022 Democrats, which GOP leadership estimates to be a total of 47 in the House and at least three in the Senate, may, to preserve their seats, cast “nay” votes. Who controls Congress in two years hence will also depend on the 2022 political climate that surrounds Biden.

For more than 35 years, major amnesties have failed because when recessing legislators take their constituents’ temperatures, they quickly learn how unpopular it is among their voters to reward illegal behavior. Voters consider amnesty a betrayal.

One of amnesty’s inexplicable ironies is the unanimous support from the Congressional Black Congress (CBC) for bills that give employment permission to foreign nationals who will compete head-to-head with low-income African-American workers in a shrinking labor pool, an inarguable fact. Amnesty also adversely effects other low-income, low-skilled residents – an estimated 17 million Americans are currently unemployed – but none are as gravely damaged as blacks.

In 2020, the African-American unemployment rate was 11.4 percent, 1.4 times as great as the 8.1 percent national average. During most of the last half century, black Americans have suffered through unemployment rates that were, had the entire population endured them, recessionary. Throughout those same 50 years, African-American unemployment has consistently been about twice that of white America.

While congressional elites are enamored of amnesty, grounded black analysts have a greater understanding of its perils. Peter Kirsanow, a member of the United States Commission on Civil Rights serving his fourth consecutive six-year term, explained immigration and amnesty’s dire consequences on African-Americans, especially the low-skilled. With amnesty pending, in a co-authored 2013 letter to then-President Obama, Kirsanow wrote that granting legal status to illegal aliens will disproportionately and further harm lower-skilled African-Americans by making it more difficult for them to obtain employment and depressing their wages when they finally do become employed. Kirsanow concluded that, then as now, “the economy has a glut of low-skilled workers.”

Today, with Biden’s amnesty looming, true black leaders are reiterating Kirsanow’s irrefutable arguments. In a recent interview, U.S. Representative Burgess Owens (R-Utah) scorned what he labeled “black elitists” like CBC members who have “lived the American dream,” but “… hurt those that are trying to get their first ladder up to the middle class.” Owens added that all of Biden’s policies which include opening the borders to workers who will vie against black Americans defeats the quest of the nation’s underclasses “to live the American dream and get to the middle class.” Summing up, Owens said that regardless of their skin color, elitists are America’s biggest threats.

In 2019, Yvette D. Clarke (D-NY), an elitist CBC member and a U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021 co-sponsor who during her eight-term career has voted for more immigration and against enforcement at least 120 times, proclaimed that immigration is a “black issue.” Clarke warned her opponents to “never forget” it. But Clarke and her like-minded Capitol Hill allies are wrong.

Immigration is an elitist cause that benefits cheap labor-addicted employers, the billionaire class, housing developers, consumer goods producers, immigration lawyers and open borders/immigration expansionist groups. But, at the same time, immigration harms down-on-their-luck Americans who need a break in the form of a tighter labor market, a helping hand they won’t get from the Biden administration.

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.

American Workers Brace for Elitists’ Amnesty

Biden’s Choice: His Silicon Valley Masters or U.S. IT Workers

By Joe Guzzardi  

From the instant that President Joe Biden takes office, he’ll be under heavy pressure from his base to undo President Trump’s immigration-related Executive Orders. But in most cases, reversing what President Trump has done will be easier said than done.

Among the greatest challenges to Biden’s administration will be its response to President Trump’s December 31 extension of his earlier temporary ban on some employment-based visas. During his first 100 days in office, Biden will be pushed hard to override President Trump’s Executive Order with his own that ends the pause.

Powerful Silicon Valley forces including Facebook, Google and Twitter – major contributors to Biden’s election – will seek their reward in the form of more H-1B, L-1, H-4 and J-1 visas. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his tech allies are certain to hammer away at their age-old and discredited messaging that more foreign workers are essential to their financial survival and that no qualified Americans are available. Inside the White House, Vice President Kamala Harris and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, assuming the Senate confirms his nomination, will reinforce Silicon Valley’s anti-U.S. shut-out of American IT workers and Big Tech’s self-serving claims.

In June, as the coronavirus pandemic was battering the economy, and forcing employers to furlough or fire workers, President Trump issued his employment-based visa pause. The President’s early summer order expired December 31, but defending American workers, Trump issued an extension set to lapse in March 2021.

Explaining his extension, Trump wrote that COVID-19’s effect on the U.S. labor market and on American communities’ health is an ongoing national concern. The current number of new daily worldwide cases announced by the World Health Organization, President Trump wrote, continues at unacceptably high numbers, and the U.S. labor market remains weak, with communities vulnerable.

Because of President Trump’s extension, Biden will immediately find himself between a rock and a hard place. First, Biden’s central campaign issue was ending the coronavirus pandemic. Biden harshly criticized President Trump for what he perceived as the president’s ineffectiveness in controlling the virus. But admitting more foreign nationals from countries that haven’t successfully tamed the virus is risk-laden for the incoming Biden administration. Importing COVID-19 infected migrants, a strong possibility without rigorous health vetting, would be a devastating beginning for the new president.

Second, grim employment statistics make a strong case for maintaining President Trump’s ban, a task that will be tough for Biden when Silicon Valley approaches him to collect its IOUs. Nearly 25 million Americans are unemployed or underemployed. Adding thousands more overseas workers to the more than one million annual lifetime employment-authorized lawful permanent residents creates a nearly insurmountable hurdle for U.S. job seekers.

Not only does Biden plan to expand the long list of existing visas, he’s committed to a program that would allow any executive of a large or midsize county or city to petition for additional immigrant visas provided employers in those regions certify that there are available jobs, and no American workers are available to fill them. In the Biden administration, any immigration policy is possible, even one as outrageous and dangerous as this hairbrained scheme that would be crippling to low-skilled American workers.

On the upside, a temporizing variable may restrain Biden. The 2022 House of Representatives race is already underway, and Democrats took an unexpectedly heavy hit in November. The touted “Blue Wave” never hit shore; the GOP added about 12 seats to its caucus, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi barely held on to her leadership post. Even in far-left California, Republicans flipped three seats.

The 2020 House results should serve as a warning to the incoming Biden administration that the nation isn’t prepared for a radical overhaul, immigration included. Over-immigration ranks high among Americans’ concerns, and Biden should tread lightly. He risks losing the House in 2022, and assuming he’ll seek it, the presidency in 2024.

Joe Guzzardi is a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist who writes about immigration and related social issues. Joe joined Progressives for Immigration Reform in 2018 as an analyst after a ten-year career directing media relations for Californians for Population Stabilization, where he also was a Senior Writing Fellow. A native Californian, Joe now lives in Pennsylvania. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org.

Obama Gang Is Back in Town

By Joe Guzzardi

As President Trump weighs which course he may walk as his White House days grow short, he’s considering two paths.

The first is to watch from a distance, and not interfere with the incoming Biden administration. Biden’s early appointees, namely Chief of Staff Ron Klain, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alexander Mayorkas and phony-baloney climate envoy John Kerry are Obama-era retreads. Given that eight years of the Obama administration – which prominently included Klain, Mayorkas and Kerry – helped elect President Trump, the president’s thinking may be that Biden’s agenda will play out favorably for the 2024 GOP candidate. The president’s second option would be to issue a slew of Executive Orders designed to keep his America First policies alive and kicking for as long as possible.

Option One is President Trump’s wisest course. Klain, Mayorkas and Kerry have track records that will not create national unity, no matter how vigorously Biden calls for Americans to join together in his support. Klain was a Silicon Valley and tech monopoly lobbyist who at the outset of the pandemic condemned President Trump’s China travel ban and disparaged Americans who have “needless fears” about the disease – wrong and wrong again.

In retrospect, Klain’s remarks are staggeringly partisan and cataclysmically misinformed. In 2016, Klain joined TechNet, one of Silicon Valley’s most powerful lobbying groups. Klain will push to end employment-based visa caps, especially on the H-1B, a long-time goal that Google, Microsoft, Apple and other tech titans have sought to further displace U.S. workers.

The last thing that America needs, but will soon get, are powerful America Last lobbyists at Biden’s side. A Wall Street Journal analysis found that at least 40 Biden transition team advisors were or are, like Klain, registered lobbyists. Represented on Biden’s team are Uber, Visa, Capital One, Airbnb, Amazon and the Chan Zuckerberg Foundation executives. In 2019, lobbyists lavished nearly $3.5 billion on behalf of expanding foreign labor, more than twice their 1999 outlay.

Mayorkas is infamous for creating deferred action for childhood arrivals, DACA, an Obama-era program that without congressional approval grants affirmative benefits to unlawfully present aliens. In a 2017 PBS interview, Mayorkas proposed expanding DACA from its current 800,000 to an unspecified total that could reach into the millions.

From 2009 to 2013, Mayorkas oversaw U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the federal agency responsible for legal immigration. Mayorkas also intervened on behalf of connected Democrats to secure EB-5 citizenship-for-sale visas for wealthy international investors. A DHS Inspector General’s report found that Mayorkas intervened “outside the normal adjudicatory process,” and “in ways that benefited the stakeholders.”

Finally, perhaps for comic relief, Biden will add Kerry to his team. A failed U.S. Senator, a 2004 presidential loser and an inept Secretary of State, Kerry is an incessant climate nag whose actions belie his preaching. Kerry’s estimated net worth exceeds $3 billion, a fortune that enabled him to purchase a $12 million, 18-acre Martha’s Vineyard ocean front mansion not far from the Obama’s estate. Although Kerry labeled climate change as “perhaps the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction,” his preferred personal travel mode is private jets, limos and luxury yachts.

Above all else, Biden, Klain, Mayorkas and Kerry share a commitment to increasing legal immigration from the current 1 million-plus annually, granting amnesty and encouraging illegal immigration. Biden’s policies will add millions of work-authorized persons to the labor pool and create a hiring bonanza for cheap labor-addicted employers. Millions of American voters rejected President Trump, but they’ll be surprised at the transformed America that Biden’s presidency is guaranteed to create.

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.

Obama Gang Is Back in Town Obama Gang Is Back