Category: Joe Guzzardi

Child Labor Back In Vogue

By Joe Guzzardi

Even though the nation is divided about immigration and its consequences, on one point, unanimity must be reached. Immigration, whether legal or illegal, cannot be a vehicle for child labor. And yet, the Department of Labor has uncovered several incidents that involve under-age migrants working in slave labor-like conditions.

A DOL Tweet: “Packers Sanitation Services Inc. has paid $1.5 M after @WHD_DOL investigators found the company employed at least 102 children-aged 13-17 – in hazardous occupations and had them working overnight shifts in 13 meat processing facilities in eight states.” Furthermore, DOL accused PSSI of employing “oppressive child labor in perilous conditions.”

In a series of stories, NBC News provided the horrific details. PSSI, a company contracted to work at slaughterhouses and meatpacking facilities throughout the county, allegedly employed at least 31 kids – one as young as 13 – to work overnight cleaning shifts at three facilities in Nebraska and Minnesota, a Fair Labor Standards Act violation. Additional evidence indicated that the company may also have employed more under-age children in similar perilous conditions at 400 other sites nationwide. Identity theft is rampant and a major facilitator in underage migrant employment.

PSSI is a huge company that employs about 17,000 and has contracts with hundreds of meatpacking facilities. Toiling at PSSI wasn’t an after-school job at the soda parlor. During the graveyard shift and across three slaughter houses, when they should have been home in bed, minors literally slaved away, mopping up bloody floors.

Interviews with the minors, in their native Spanish language, revealed that several children began their slaughterhouse shifts at 11 p.m. and worked until dawn, some for six or seven days a week, and often for periods of up to 15 months. At least three victims suffered chemical burns.

The NBC News story skirted the central factor that abets minor children’s criminal employment – President Biden and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ open border. Don’t be misled. The media’s deceptive language about “unaccompanied minors” (UACs) is intended to deflect the truth – UACs are more accurately described as the victims of child smuggling rings and are tied into the Biden administration’s open borders policy. As the minors mature into adulthood, they become embedded in the permanent labor force. To most of them, any job is a good job. They need incomes to send remittances back home and to pay off their smuggling fees.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection statistics show that after President Biden took office in January 2021, he acted immediately to eliminate effective policies, including categorically exempting UACs from Title 42. UAC encounters skyrocketed. Between FY 2020 and FY 2021, total UAC encounters at the Southwest border increased a staggering 342 percent, from 33,239 in FY 2020 to 146,913 in FY 2021. Those encounters increased to 152,057 in FY 2022 and are on pace to be at a similar level in FY 2023.

At a recent Senate hearing, Secretary Mayorkas couldn’t explain the child exploitation surge under his watch, a fact that The New York Times described as “ignored or missed.” Multiple veteran government staffers and outside contractors told the Health and Human Services Department, including in reports which reached Secretary Xavier Becerra, that children could be at risk. Critics had previously brought to Mayorkas’ attention that the DHS Office of Refugee Resettlement routinely releases minors into the custody of unvetted families, many of whom are illegally present, and likely also illegally employed. The Labor Department also issued news releases that noted an increase in child labor. Senior White House aides were shown proof of exploitation, like migrants working with heavy industrial equipment and caustic chemicals. The net result of multiple efforts to shine light on booming child exploitation: nothing.

Multiple felonies are committed on every step of the journey from the border to the slaughterhouse. Corrupt government and private sector employers hold the upper hand. Fines are meaningless. Hard jail time might make a difference. But if Congress can’t pass mandatory E-Verify, it’s unlikely to put its weight behind throwing the donor class behind bars.

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

Child Labor Back In Vogue Child Labor Back In Vogue

Pop Growth Outpaces Housing Starts

By Joe Guzzardi

The nation’s housing shortage, 6.5 million homes, is an out-of-control crisis, according to CNN’s dire warning last month. Between 2012 and 2022, 15.6 million households were formed. During the same period, 13 million housing units (9 million single-family homes and 4 million multi-family homes) were started. Of the 13 million, 11.9 million were completed (8.5 million single-family homes and 3.4 million multi-family homes).

In 2021’s second half and the first part of 2022, the fast-paced building spurt continued. Then, with the Federal Reserve determined that slowing inflation was essential, interest rates including those on mortgages rose, and housing demand cooled. Builders backed away from single-family housing starts. The solution to the shortage, CNN predicted, would be to triple the single-family home housing starts which would, within three or four years, close the existing 6.5 million shortage, and keep up with new demand.

The CNN story mentioned, but did not elaborate on, the shortage’s cause: in 2022, the U.S. saw the last decade’s highest annual household formation level with 2.06 million new households. Population growth, long ignored by Congress and the establishment media as toxic and unmentionable, drives the need for more development. The equation between ever-more people and the need to build homes for them is obvious, but unmentionable. Accelerating growth remains taboo because the subject will eventually come around to immigration, an even more uncomfortable topic.

The math that the Census Bureau and other federal agencies provide is inarguable. Every year, more than 1 million permanent residents enter the U.S. Another 1 million arrive on temporary employment visas. Whether they return to their home countries or not, they need housing during their visa’s term. Since Biden’s inauguration, his administration’s open border policy has welcomed about 5 million asylum seekers, with millions more to come before the president’s 2024 re-election bid.

Add more than 2 million gotaways — the 1.2 million to date that Customs and Border Protection knows about and the roughly million certain to elude border agents in the next 18 months. During the Biden administration’s four years, between 10 and 15 million legal permanent residents, guest workers, asylum seekers and gotaways will need housing. The Census Bureau predicts that by 2060 the nation’s immigrant population will rise from its current 14.3 percent to 17.1 percent of the total U.S. population.

The powerful pro-growth lobby maintains a $60 million Capitol Hill presence, and Congress’ informal motto is “the more, the better,” especially if it makes donors’ wishes come true. The list of negatives that over-development worsens is long. Among them are biodiversity loss, carbon emission increases and overcrowding. At the top of the list, however, are water shortages, a problem so acute that the Biden administration has proposed cutting the Colorado River’s water allotments delivered to California, Arizona and Nevada by as much as one-quarter. The Colorado River provides drinking water to 40 million Americans and irrigates 5.5 million agricultural acres.

With water running low and development an increasing environmental scourge, a responsible federal government would comply with the requirement to weigh the environmental effect on any new policies it enacts; opening the Southwest and Northern Borders would be such a policy. The National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act require an environmental impact study. But like U.S. immigration laws, the Biden administration ignores the federally mandated obligation to conduct environmental impact studies, perhaps because it knows that the results would be catastrophic to developers and to Biden’s commitment to mass immigration.

Immigration and births to immigrants are the biggest population growth drivers in the U.S. As long as the status quo continues, housing demand will be impossible to fully satisfy. Good luck to builders tackling that challenge, especially in the increasingly dry Southwest, and good luck to the established neighborhoods that will have to cope with the quality-of-life-altering sprawl that overdevelopment creates.

Joe Guzzardi writes about immigration issues and impacts.

Pop Growth Outpaces Housing Starts

Giant Cruise Ships Bad For Environment

By Joe Guzzardi

The cruise ship industry puts out beguiling advertisements intended to attract more customers on board. Showing couples in summer wear, sipping cocktails and looking out over the ocean to watch the setting sun as they sail off to a distant, romantic destination, ads appear everywhere, from television, social media and movie previews to subway cars.

A closer look at the cruise ship business and its harmful effects on the ecosystem paint a far grimmer picture than advertisements convey. Hakai Magazine, an online publication that focuses on science and society in coastal regions, created the route of the Oceanic Topaz, a fictional but representative cruise ship, on a seven-day journey from Seattle to Alaska. The weeklong trip stopped at various ports like Juneau, Ketchikan and Victoria, before returning to Seattle.

This year, an estimated 700,000 passengers will depart Seattle on hundreds of different cruises. Travelers’ voyages are on increasingly massive ships that house, feed and process the waste of upward of 4,000 passengers. From 2015 until today, the average weight of a major line’s new cruise ship was 164,000 gross tons — more than twice the size of a ship built during the 1990s. The Symphony of the Seas weighs a staggering 228,081 gross tons.

Touted as inexpensive, all-inclusive vacations, Pacific Northwest cruises deliver thousands of people to the glaciers, fjords and small towns of southeast Alaska. Cruises are an integral part of the Pacific Northwest’s tourism economy, but they bring with them significant environmental degradation and deleterious human consequences. Carbon emissions, wastewater discharges, engine and propeller noise, mountains of trash and an unmanageable tourist influx have had a damaging cumulative impact on the ecosystems of tiny communities. As they move from stop-to-stop, the massive vessels disrupt fish, whales and birds; while docked, residents.

This tourism season, 13 ships will make 291 trips between Seattle and Alaska; the imaginary Oceanic Topaz will begin its journey in Seattle which derives significant economic benefits from cruise passengers. In 2022, cruise tourists spend around $900 million in the greater Seattle area, income that supports about 5,500 jobs. That’s the good news. On the other hand, as an Alaska-bound ship sets sail, its 3,600 passengers go about their daily business of flushing toilets, showering and brushing teeth. Each passenger will produce a daily average of 7 gallons of sewage — also known as black water — and about 66 gallons of wastewater from showers, pools, laundry and other non-sewage runoff known as gray water. For a ship carrying 3,600 people, that amounts to about 400 eight-person hot tubs worth of sewage and over 3,000 hot tubs worth of gray water each day.

A grand ship voyage with dramatic views and promised nonstop fun on board is hard for tourists to resist. But add together the carbon emissions, wastewater pollution, noise impacts, trash, thousands of tourists and the impact on wildlife, and the negative effect of cruising is overwhelming.

The argument for economic gains for small communities is understandable and persuasive. But as the Oceanic Topaz example shows, the regions that host these mammoth floating hotels also have a lot to lose. In 2019, in Victoria, where cruise ships have the option to offload accumulated garbage rather than return it to their home port of Seattle, the equivalent of 100 fully loaded garbage trucks were dumped in the region’s Hartland Landfill.

Pre-COVID, the cruise industry’s aggregate revenue hit $27 billion. The U.S., with its long coastlines and easy access to Caribbean ports, leads the world in cruise revenue. By 2026, cruise revenue is expected to reach $35 billion.

Cruise lines have a powerful presence in Washington, D.C. Unlike U.S. airlines and hotels, cruise lines did not benefit from generous government subsidies since they are not registered in the U.S., and therefore American laws do not entirely bind them. Consequently, lobbying by cruise lines spiked from the average $3.5 million between 2009 and 2019 to $4.4 million in 2020 and $5.3 million in 2021. The objective: to get those floating hotels back on the water after the sharp COVID-19-related decline.

An all-out ban on cruise ships is unrealistic, but daily limits at ports-of-call make sense. Based in part on a 2022 commissioned study that the Juneau Assembly requested and in which 74 percent of residents supported limits, the final approval urged a five-ship limit. But such an obvious idea to at least reduce the adverse outcome for residents and the ecosystem has little chance against Big Money interests.

Joe Guzzardi writes about immigration issues and impacts. Find his immigration pieces at Immigration News on Substack.

Giant Cruise Ships Bad For Environment

Mickey Mantle’s Regrets

By Joe Guzzardi

In 1994, a year before his death from alcohol-induced cirrhosis, hepatitis C and inoperable liver cancer, Mickey Mantle gave a remorseful interview to Sports Illustrated. The New York Yankees superstar center fielder and first-ballot Hall of Fame inductee recounted his life as an alcoholic with brutal candor. Mantle admitted that because of alcohol abuse, he ended up “killing himself.”

Except to other alcoholics, Mantle’s confession about how drinking kept him from living a more fulfilling life and ruptured his relationships with friends and family doesn’t square with baseball diamond fame. Mantle began some of his mornings with what he called the “breakfast of champions,” a big glass filled with a shot or more of brandy, some Kahlúa and cream. Yankees’ second baseman Billy Martin, a regular drinking partner, and Mantle would stop at Mickey’s Central Park South restaurant where the bartender blended the ingredients and served them up. As Mickey remembered, the frozen drinks “tasted real good.”

Mantle’s “breakfast of champions” was the first of many drinks he threw back each day. Inevitably, Mickey’s heavy drinking led to long blackout periods. By his own admission, Mantle would forget what day it was, what city he was in and about his commitments to appear at baseball card signing shows, although he eventually showed up. The best man at Martin’s 1988 wedding, Mantle “hardly remember(ed) being there.” One year later, Mantle served as a pallbearer at Martin’s funeral. Billy had been killed in a single vehicle automobile accident on Christmas Day. Although there is some dispute about whether Martin or his friend Bill Reedy drove, no one questions that the pair had been drinking heavily in the hours before the fatal crash.

After Mantle retired, his drinking became, in his words, “really bad.” He went through a deep depression. Teammates Billy, Whitey Ford, Hank Bauer and Moose Skowron were part of his past life, and leaving those guys “left a hole in me.” Mantle tried to fill up his baseball emptiness with nonstop alcohol intake.

The older Mantle got, the more he drank. Family and friends begged Mantle to get help. But Mantle stubbornly refused. Like too many alcoholics, Mantle foolishly convinced himself that he could stop whenever he wanted. But at a charity golf outing for the Harbor Club Children’s Christmas Fund near Atlanta, Mantle hit bottom. He drank Bloody Marys in the morning, and then downed two bottles of wine in the afternoon. At the card show that evening, Mantle embarrassed himself with his obnoxious, drunken behavior. In his alcohol-fueled stupors, Mantle often berated autograph seekers, a shock to his fans who cherished his image as a homey, blond-hair, crewcut Oklahoma kid.

Atlanta was an overdue awakening for Mantle. Finally seeking guidance, Mantle approached his son Danny who had been treated at the Betty Ford Center. Three of Mantle’s four sons and his wife Merlyn were also alcoholics. While Mantle deliberated about checking into the Betty Ford Center, his doctor gave him his MRI results: Mickey needed a liver transplant.

Once at Betty Ford, Mantle confronted his uncomfortable truth. Mantle admitted that, as he told Sports Illustrated, “he really screwed up,” was a lousy family man, and preferred running around with his baseball buddies. Envisioning his life as a sober, responsible Mantle, Mickey had big plans, but did not live long enough to realize them to the fullest. His goal was to stay sober, be strong and make amends. At his final press conference, Mantle said to an audience aghast at his wasted-away body: “This is a role model: Don’t be like me.”

Today, Mantle is remembered mostly for his brilliant baseball achievements: 20 All-Star games, three AL MVP awards including one in his 1956 Triple Crown season, seven World Series championship rings, four AL Home Run crowns, and a first ballot Hall of Fame inductee.

But for the millions of Americans suffering from alcoholism, Mantle’s ability to overcome – although too late to save his life – is a bigger triumph than any of his baseball feats. For more information, go to the National Alcohol Awareness Month website here.

Joe Guzzardi is a Society for American Baseball Research and Internet Baseball Writers Association member. You can also read his content here. Contact him at guzzjoe@yahoo.com.

Mickey Mantle’s Regrets Mickey Mantle’s Regrets

China Perpetrating Greatest Transfer of Wealth in History

By Joe Guzzardi

Customs and Border Protection agents have identified individuals from more than 150 nations attempting, mostly successfully, to enter the United States. Among those aliens, the Chinese are arriving in increasingly large numbers.

The journey for these Chinese is thousands of miles long, costly and dangerous — one that few would willingly embark upon since their futures, once in the U.S., would be uncertain. The Chinese migrants speak little English and have limited work skills. Nevertheless, one Chinese migrant, Zhang Kiayu, began his journey north in Ecuador, then traveled through Colombia, passed through the treacherous Darien Gap where smugglers then coordinated his travel on to Panama before reaching the Mexico/Texas border. Speculation is on the rise that the migrants may be Chinese Communist Party agents. A CCP affiliation would explain who funded the $35,000 Kiayu paid traffickers.

Texas Department of Public Safety Lt. Chris Olivarez said that the spike in Chinese migrants is unusual and “very alarming.” Olivarez blamed the cartels who are, he said, running a “very lucrative business.” During February 2023, there were 1,368 encounters of Chinese migrants versus 55 during February 2022. Since October, just five months into the current fiscal year, the total has grown to 4,366.

Chinese immigration to the U.S. has a long and often turbulent history. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and restrictions that the Chinese government imposed after World War II and the Chinese Communist Revolution limited migration. But after the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 removed the barriers for non-European immigrants, and after China relaxed it emigration restrictions, the number of Chinese immigrants residing in the U.S. nearly doubled from 370,000 in 1980 to 677,000 in 1990. The number doubled again by 2000 to more than 1.8 million before reaching 2.4 million in 2021. The Chinese population has continued to grow. Chinese Americans are the largest Asian origin group in the U.S., and represent the third largest origin group after Mexican and Indian migrants.

There’s an important distinction between then and now, however. The Chinese surging the border are illegal aliens as opposed to earlier waves that, for the most part, arrived in the U.S. through a legal port of entry and held a valid visa. Kiayu and the others released at the Southwest border were given notices to appear for an immigration hearing. Even if their intention is to show up, and fewer than half do, appointments are often backlogged for up to seven years. During the waiting period, the whereabouts and the intentions of the unvetted migrants, Chinese and otherwise, will remain unknown. Evaluating the arriving Chinese, some wonder if given the CCP’s quest for world domination, their government might be motivated to take advantage of the Biden administration’s open borders to smuggle agents into the U.S.

The Biden administration may play down or even dismiss the national security threat that China represents, but FBI Director Christopher Wray has a different perspective. Wray points to what the FBI calls China’s “Talent Plans” that allow its nationals with existing jobs in the U.S. “to participate in such plans part-time so they can maintain their access to intellectual property, trade secrets, pre-publication data and methods, and U.S. funding for their research.” These plans, maintains the FBI, represent a risk to universities, laboratories and U.S. businesses. Wray told a Hudson Institute audience that the FBI opens a new case related to China every 10 hours and that 50 percent of the roughly 5,000 active FBI counterintelligence cases are China-related.

China’s foreign minister Qin Gang warned of pending “conflict and confrontation” with the U.S. In turn, the Department of State cautioned against U.S. citizens traveling to China because of “arbitrary enforcement of local laws” and the risk of wrongful detention.

FBI alerts about Chinese interference in U.S. affairs are more than hypothetical. In 2018, the U.S. Trade Representative estimated that Chinese theft of American IP costs U.S. firms between $225 billion and $600 billion every year. In 2014, China stole the files of more than 22 million Americans, including the security-clearance files of everyone in the intelligence establishment. General Keith Alexander, a former National Security Agency director, has called China’s technology theft “the greatest transfer of wealth in human history.”

With red flags flying, and with the stakes at American universities, laboratories and businesses high, Biden’s indifference to the Chinese entering illegally, and virtually at will, proves his callous disregard for the nation he’s sworn to defend and the citizens who trusted him.

Joe Guzzardi writes about immigration issues and impacts. Sign up here for free to receive immigration columns in your inbox.

China Perpetrating Greatest Transfer of Wealth in History

From Coal Mines To Cooperstown, A Baseball Story For Saint Patrick’s Day

By Joe Guzzardi

In 1869, Hughie Jennings became the ninth of 12 children born into a Pittston, Pa., coal mining family. At age 12, Jennings dropped out of school to work as a breaker boy in the mines near Scranton where he picked slate from coal for 90 cents a day. Amid clouds of coal dust and the machinery’s rushing roar, breaker boys worked bent over backless wooden benches to perform their 10-hour-a-day tasks. A 1900 Bureau of Mines report found that colliery accidents killed 411, injured 1,057, and made 230 widows and 524 orphans.

But from those hardscrabble days, Jennings eventually entered the Hall of Fame based on his sterling career as a ball player and manager. The Irish-American also became an admired trial lawyer. In his book “EE-YAH,” Society for American Baseball Research historian Jack Smiles tracked Jennings’ career all the way back to when he was a 90-pound catcher for hometown ball clubs like the Moosic Anthracites. In 1889 Hughie signed for $5 a game with a Lehighton, Pa., semi-pro team, and left the mines behind for good. Jennings always said that what most motivated him throughout his career was to play so skillfully that he’d never return to the pits.

Jennings’ first contract called for $50 monthly, a fortune compared to his miner wages. By 1894, Jennings landed with the old National League Baltimore Orioles where he teamed up with Irish-American players still revered today. Under manager Ned Hanlon’s guidance, John J. McGraw, Wee Willie Keeler, Joe Kelley, Dan Brouthers, Wilbert Robinson and Jennings – Hall of Famers all – the Orioles won three straight pennants. Jennings emerged as baseball’s top shortstop, both offensively and defensively.

During the Orioles’ championship years, Jennings had some of the best-ever seasons by a major league shortstop. In 1895, he hit .386, scored 159 runs, collected 204 hits, knocked in 125 runs, and stole 53 bases. In 1896, his performance was even better, as he hit .401, behind Cleveland’s Jesse Burkett’s .405, with 209 hits, 121 RBI and 70 stolen bases. To get on base, the fearless Jennings would do anything. His 1896 hit-by-pitch total, 51, is a still-standing major league record. The Orioles’ winning formula was old-fashioned, inside baseball – the bunt, the hit-and-run, the stolen base and the Baltimore chop. The Orioles cheated, too, like tripping opposing players as they rounded third and headed for home.

After a chaotic period where various teams bid for his services, during autumn 1899, Jennings attended the Cornell Law School in the off-season. Obtaining a law school diploma was a high enough priority that Jennings refused to report to the Brooklyn Superbas until June so that he could complete his spring term. In exchange for his tuition, Jennings coached the Cornell baseball team. Jennings fell two semesters short of graduating from Cornell, but he passed enough classes to take the bar exam, and was admitted to practice in Maryland and in Pennsylvania.

After a four-year stint piloting the Orioles, in 1907, Jennings took over the Detroit Tigers and young Ty Cobb. The Tigers won three straight pennants, but won only one World Series. The firebrand Cobb, however, blossomed. He won 12 batting titles in 13 years and set stolen base records. Jennings stayed with Detroit until 1920, and then took over the New York Giants for parts of 1924 and 1925 seasons.

Sportswriters called the firebrand Jennings “Ee-yah” for his third base coaching box antics, “Hustling Hughie” for his aggressive infield play and “Big Daddy,” not for his 5’8” stature, but because he served as a role model for the 100 other men who followed him from the Northeastern coal mines to the major leagues. In the final three winters of his life, 1925-27, Jennings contracted tuberculosis and meningitis before, at age 58, passing away in 1928 at his Scranton home.

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

From Coal Mines To Cooperstown, A Baseball Story For Saint Patrick’s Day

Schools Struggle to Accommodate Migrant Students

By Joe Guzzardi

Regardless of how bitter the immigration argument – and the debate routinely sinks to new hostility lows – both enforcement advocates and expansionists should agree that open borders must not be allowed to disrupt public education. If an individual’s station in life prevents him from enrolling his children in private schools, then a solid public education is essential. Without proper education in the basics, the nation’s children will have a long climb toward success in adulthood.

No one can argue persuasively that the border surge, which includes hundreds of thousands of K-12 age youths, will do anything except further drag down the nation’s failing public school system. Everything in America’s public schools reflects crisis mode.

For public schools, the trend is headed in the wrong direction and tumbling freefall-style further into the abyss. Enrollment is down, and chronic absenteeism is up. Shortages abound – teachers, substitutes, bus drivers and maintenance personnel. School board meetings are battle zones that often require security to prevent fisticuffs. For 9-year-olds, math and reading test scores have plummeted to their lowest levels in decades. This is a key age for creating a strong academic foundation. Black and Hispanic students fell further behind white students. Reliance on mental health services has become more common. Violence, including shootings and sexual assaults against teachers, has escalated.

Into this chaotic cauldron, waves of migrant children have entered the U.S. from more than 100 nations, and they speak dozens of different languages and dialects in our K-12 schools. Some have never attended school, and others possess only a rudimentary understanding of how a classroom functions. Enrollments occur on a rolling basis throughout the school year. No matter how disruptive migrant enrollment is to the existing student body and to the teachers, the process is a constitutional imperative.

In June 1982, the Supreme Court issued Plyler v. Doe, a landmark decision which held that that states cannot constitutionally deny students a free public education based on their illegal immigrant status. By a 5-4 vote, the Court ruled that any fiscal resources which could be saved by excluding illegal immigrant children from public schools were far outweighed by societal harms that might be created from denying an education to unlawfully present children.

The Supreme Court has ruled, but the teachers and school administrators are the ones who must somehow impart a quality education despite the challenges that the migrants represent. And with teachers now coping with the ongoing enrollment of non-English speaking students, citizen children are at a disadvantage. When polled, a plurality of working-class, blue-collar Americans said that illegal immigration has made their local school systems worse off, a new study revealed.

The latest Rasmussen Reports survey showed that 40 percent of Americans who earn less than $30,000 felt that illegal immigration made their local schools less effective, while 41 percent of those who earned $30,000 to $50,000 reached the same conclusion.

Among working class, middle class and upper-middle class Americans, less than 10 percent say illegal immigration has made their local schools better, while 34 to 45 percent say there has not been much of an impact. In his House Judiciary Committee testimony earlier this year, U.S. Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) stated the obvious: public schools packed with non-English speakers are a disadvantage to citizen children eager to learn and advance. “What the Democrats have never explained is how our schools are made better by packing classrooms with non-English speaking students,” McClintock said.

Nationally, the English language learner (ELL) student population will continue to grow rapidly, the predictable consequence of an open border. The projected number of school-age immigrant children increased from 12.3 million in 2005 to 17.9 million in 2020, a total which accounted for most of the school-age population growth during the period. Most of today’s immigrant children will require ELL services.

During the 1950s, California’s public schools ranked among the nation’s best. But decades later after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 and the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, California drifted toward the bottom of the heap. One reason for the steep decline: California’s K-12 ELL enrollment is 1.1 million students. Attending to immigrant children’s special academic needs, including developing language skills, detracts from teacher time that would otherwise be allotted to citizen children. After two years of remote instruction, children need every moment to catch up and shouldn’t be required to share valuable classroom time with illegal immigrants.

Schools Struggle to Accommodate Migrant Students

Senate Again Introduces E-Verify

By Joe Guzzardi

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) reintroduced legislation to help businesses comply with immigration laws by certifying that their employees are legally authorized to work in the United States. The “Accountability Through Electronic Verification Act” would permanently authorize and expand the E-Verify program, an internet-based program. The bill requires employers to use the program within one year of enactment to determine workers’ eligibility. Employers must terminate workers that E-Verify cannot confirm as legally work-authorized, and those employers are subject to increased penalties.

Grassley said that businesses nationwide use E-Verify to help them comply with our immigration laws, reduce illegal immigration incentives, and provide Americans and other legal workers job safeguards. Expanding the system to every workplace, Grassley added, will improve all businesses’ accountability “and take an important step toward putting American workers first.”

In addition to the most obvious E-Verify advantage – protecting U.S. jobs – the program has countless other indirect benefits. Illegal border crossings and visa overstays would be dramatically reduced or eliminated once unscrupulous employers could no longer hire illegal aliens.

Because E-Verify would eliminate the jobs magnet, Customs and Border Protection agents, as well as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, would be, in large part, relieved of the headaches of asking for identification from non-English speaking foreign nationals. Freed from the tedium of dealing with job seekers, law enforcement personnel could, assuming the White House and the Department of Homeland Security allow them to carry out their duties, including pursuing and arresting cartel criminals and human traffickers. With E-Verify in place at work sites, people who can’t get jobs will move home voluntarily. Family separation would become a thing of the past.

A Carnegie Mellon University study confirmed that Arizona’s mandatory E-Verify law played an important role in self-deportation among illegal immigrants coming from and returning to Mexico. The study noted that, after E-Verify was mandated, the average return migration rate to Mexican states nearly quadrupled over the time period observed. Mexican states like Sonora, where roughly 50 percent of migrants had previously settled in Arizona, experienced 30 percent larger growth in its return migration rate compared to a state with weaker connections to Arizona.

Another E-Verify advantage is that implementing the program would help end identity theft, a huge problem which in 2020 created losses to unsuspecting consumers that totaled $56 billion. Employee information taken from an I-9 form, the paper-based employee eligibility verification form used for all new hires, is compared against existing Social Security Administration and DHS databases. If the data doesn’t match, then the probability is that the SSN doesn’t belong to the applicant. Nancy Berryhill, in 2018 an Acting Commissioner of Social Security, testified to the House Subcommittee on Social Security. She concluded: “Mandatory use of EVerify by employers would help reduce the incidence of fraudulent use of SSNs.”

With the protections that E-Verify offers for American workers, and the deterrent that creates against illegal immigration, the wonder is why past bills, similar in most respects and dating back more than three decades, haven’t received congressional traction. The harsh, but inescapable, truth is that the donor class wants cheap labor, and Congress’ objective is to keep donors happy, U.S. workers be damned.

Senate Again Introduces E-Verify