Category: Guest Authors

Francis And DJT And Immigration

By Joe Guzzardi

“The Pope is Dead, Long Live the Papacy,” reads the Crisis Magazine headline. Crisis describes itself as the nation’s most trusted source for authentic Roman Catholic perspectives on church and state, arts and culture, science and faith. The article scathingly assessed Pope Francis for his progressive views and hoped that the next pope would adhere to more traditional Catholic values. Among the many criticisms leveled at Pope Francis were that he permitted Holy Communion for unrepentant sinners, okayed same-sex couples’ marriages, put Islam on the same footing as Catholicism, and forged the Vatican-China agreement which created a new diocese in totalitarian China.

My disclaimer: I’m a baptized Roman Catholic, an altar boy who served faithfully for several years, and remained active in church activities until my late teens. Priests frequently visited our home, so often that I considered entering the priesthood. But I gradually drifted away, and nothing distanced me faster and farther than when the Boston Globe in 2002 exposed the sexual abuse cases, which would eventually be revealed to span the globe to include hundreds of pedophile priests, thousands of victims and billions in settlements. In Boston alone, 140 priests were implicated in sex abuse charges against 552 victims, with more than $85 million in payments.  In retrospect, I’m lucky that I, as a former altar boy with priests welcomed as regular guests at our house, escaped the horrific crimes that my young peers suffered.

To the list of grievances that Crisis detailed, I’ll add one more. On immigration, the Roman Catholic Church is hypocritical. From parish priests all the way up to the pope, their message is consistent—accept more illegal immigrants. If the faithful turn their backs on their fellow man, they’re not true Christians but rather selfish xenophobes. The Roman Catholic clergy holds predictably hardline opinions on President Trump, his deportation policy and the White House’s determination to protect American sovereignty.

Take as an example the former San Diego Cardinal Robert McElroy, a progressive like Pope Francis and recently transferred to Washington D.C. to become the district’s archbishop. Asked if he would meet President Donald Trump when he became a permanent D.C. resident, McElroy replied that, in the short term, he had no such plans. Then, McElroy added in an obvious criticism of U.S. immigration, “What does it mean in our society to be a compassionate society … and we believe in the human dignity of every person?”  McElroy called the wall and deportations “incompatible with Catholic doctrine,” added that Pope Francis shares his “profound concern” on the U.S.-Mexico border which he considers a “wider cultural attack” on those fleeing persecution and violence. The Pope said a problem today is an effort to portray immigrants as criminals. “When you classify people as criminals,” McElroy said, you class them as “the other, as different,” and thus deserving of lesser treatment, a curious statement that does not distinguish between convicted criminals like MS-13 or Tren de Aragua gangsters and family reunification immigrants. Ironically Italy, without papal interference, has cut immigration arrivals via sea by 60%, cracked down on false asylum claims, and made deals with some African nations to try to block departures.

Moreover, McElroy has his own shameful past tied to the pedophile disgrace. Victims’ lawyers claim that McElroy has been involved in serial cover-ups on behalf of the perpetrators. In 2007, the San Diego Diocese settled lawsuits brought by 144 victims, but recently more than 450 claims have been made. The Diocese said more than 60% of the latest claims are for incidents that occurred more than 50 years ago. If true, five decades still does not erase the victims’ pain or nightmarish memories. In his statement last year, McElroy alleged that settling the remaining cases at the same rate they were settled in 2007 would cost the church upwards of $550 million. To avoid that high-payout, McElroy put the Archdiocese into bankruptcy last year as he sought to delay or deny compensation to more than 500 victims. Just hours before the first of about 150 cases were scheduled for trial, the archdiocese filed for Chapter 11 protection. Now, alleged victims looking for a settlement with the church will find themselves in bankruptcy court.

McElroy scorned President Trump #45 and #47, but he said he had a lengthy call with former President Joe Biden that included a discussion about the border. The breathtaking hypocrisy starts here. McElroy once said that abortion “remains our preeminent priority because it directly attacks life itself.” Yet, McElroy was willing to interact with one of history’s most pro-abortion presidents and, along with Vice President Kamala Harris, women’s right-to-choose administrations. Biden signed an executive order defending women’s ability to cross state borders to obtain an abortion, and he admonished the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. The Pope’s duplicity reached a peak when earlier this year President Biden awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, an honor Pope Francis should have refused with the explanation that he could not accept the prestigious medal from a pro-abortion president. Because of his abortion advocacy, Biden should be a pariah to Pope Francis and McElroy.

Final thought: McElroy is foolish to avoid meeting President Trump. Differences are best resolved face-to-face, not using the media as his messenger. If McElroy would reach out to President Trump, he would assuredly be invited to the White House and the Cardinal could lay out his personal immigration vision. He may not sell it, but McElroy would have a chance to speak his mind to the U.S. president, a privilege few Americans ever get.

Joe Guzzardi is an Institute for Sound Public Policy analyst. Contact him at jguzzardi@ifspp.org

Globalist Billionaire MLB Owner Import Players

By Joe Guzzardi

On March 17, Major League Baseball celebrated its Opening Day but, alas, not on U.S. soil. In one of its innumerable money grabs, MLB’s first games that counted in the season’s standings have been played in Mexico, Sydney, Tokyo, Seoul, and San Juan. Opening Day was once considered an informal national holiday, hopefully a sunny, spring day to eat peanuts, popcorn and Cracker Jacks while watching great baseball. The uplifting sentiment doesn’t transfer when the first game is played in the Tokyo Dome with its offerings of nori bento, sukiyaki and cod roe potato salad. The National Pastime concept, as it was once treasured, is dead and buried.

I’m fed up with MLB’s PED abuse tolerance, a federal felony, its acceptance of shifty and dishonest PED testimony to Congress, another felony, and its winking to federal authorities about known human trafficking of Cubans to a safe third country where they establish a fake identity, elude immigration officials, and then proceed to the U.S. and an MLB roster spot, innumerable felonies. Eddie Dominguez, a decorated Boston Police Department officer, FBI special task force agent, and for six years a member of MLB’s Department of Investigations wrote that, “When it comes to Cuban players, human traffickers, and all that goes with it [crimes], MLB isn’t interested.”

Looking at the facts, some could conclude that MLB has the smacking of a criminal enterprise. At the least, MLB is profoundly anti-American worker as attested to by the 30 training camps in the Dominican Republic and zero in the U.S. as well as its rush to sign high-ticket Japanese players. Remember, playing baseball is a job complete with a contract.  Maybe the Japanese are better than the American kid fresh off the Texas Longhorns campus, but the college youth is just as entertaining to watch. If you doubt me, tune in to the College World Series. Still, about 40 percent of Opening Day rosters featured foreign-born players from more than a dozen international countries.

Jose Abreau, a former Chicago White Sox MVP and now a free agent, testified before Congress that on the last leg of his journey from Cuba to Haiti to Miami, he ate his fake passport. Abreau knew that customs officials would instantly identify his phony documentation and arrest him. The Cuban national received immunity in exchange for his tell-all testimony. A series of crimes helped Abreau launch his career and paved the way to earning more than $150 million with $30 million more due from the when it released him.

My vigorous resistance to baseball’s corporatization is to have made the same vow that I did in 2023— to not watch either on television or in person or to listen to a single MLB inning. Abstinence was easy. I filled my baseball cravings with local high school and NCAA games, the Independent League, the Pony League World Series and minor leagues. I’m kicking myself that I weakened in 2024, a mistake I’ll try not to make again this year. One thing I can swear to on The Bible: I will not buy a MLB ticket or waste one thin dime on its flimsy, overpriced promotional junk.  If I had more years to live, I would aspire to the New York Yankees’ World Series championship shortstop and NBC broadcaster Tony Kubek’s accomplishment. In 1994, Kubek walked away from his lucrative television contract—$1.2 million annually adjusted for inflation— and has not watched one second of baseball in the three decades since. Kubek: “I hate what the game’s become, the greed, the nastiness.” Kubek, now 89, could have added hypocritical. Gambling is everywhere in baseball. Get your bets down! But contemptible, hard-hearted Commissioner Rob Manfred granted no forgiveness to one of baseball’s greatest, hardest playing, and the all-time hits leader. For his misdemeanor gambling offense 35 years ago, Pete Rose went to his grave, banned from the Hall of Fame.

No decision in baseball’s 150-plus years has fundamentally altered it for the worse than MLB’s elimination of 42 minor league affiliates before the 2021 season. Pulling out of 25% of its minor league towns would reportedly cut costs on what baseball’s suits considered an anachronistic player development system. Bring on the computers and the Ivy League geeks who know how to extract the minutia about launch angles, exit velocities and other mumbo-jumbo that traditionalists could care less about. As former All-Star and World Series champion Jayson Worth said, “the super nerds…are ruining the game. Just put the laptops out there and let them play.”

Dinosaur fans like me are living in a whole new and diminished baseball world. New York Yankees general manager Brian Cashman explains: “Bottom line is this is big business … This should be run like a Wall Street boardroom where you pursue assets. No different than if you’re in the oil industry and you want to buy some oil rigs out in the gulf.” Forbes valued the Yankees’ franchise at $8.2 billion, the wealthiest among MLB teams.

Sadly, too few of my fellow baseball afficionados adhere to my admittedly hardline stance. Imagine my delight then when I came upon investigative journalist Will Bardenwerper’s new book “Homestand, Small Town Baseball and the Fight for the Soul of America” who wrote eloquently about the consequences on communities who lose their minor league franchises. On MLB’s chopping block were working-class communities like Pulaski, Virginia; Elizabethton, Tennessee; Bluefield, West Virginia; Williamsport, Pennsylvania; and Batavia, New York. The decision by billionaire, globalist major league owners to extinguish community ball clubs, some of the few remaining places where people could still find happiness and connection, for affordable prices as they had for generations, merely to save the equivalent of one major league minimum salary per franchise, $760,000, struck Bardenwerper as emblematic of so much of what was wrong with today’s America. Stadium workers lose their jobs, local restaurants and coffee shops struggle to stay afloat, and senior citizens lose a hallowed ballpark gathering place. But since the communities and their workers are blue-collar, globalists like MLB’s principals don’t care enough about small-town America’s fate to reconsider the damning effect their money-grubbing strategy will have.

The minor leagues’ contraction accelerated its ownership evolution from local mom and pop owners to private equity financiers who have been circling the teams that have thus far escaped MLB’s scythe. In just a few years, one enterprise, Diamond Baseball Holdings (DBH), has gobbled up a staggering 41 of the remaining 120 clubs. DBH is, in other words, a baseball holding company—just like the conglomerates on the Big Board.

Bardenwerper’s book focuses on Batavia, New York and its’ Muckdogs. Batavia is a small city on the Rust Belt’s periphery but for over a century, Batavia had enjoyed something special, a minor league ball club. Locals treasured being part of a direct pipeline from their cozy ballparks to the grand cathedrals of the game like Fenway Park and Wrigley Field. Just as importantly, they had a place to come together and enjoy the company of friends and neighbors, at affordable prices, on warm summer nights. Industries and factories may have left, but baseball did not.

Minor league professional baseball in Batavia dated back to the 1897 establishment of the Batavia Giants. The old railroad town had featured the New York-Penn League team almost continuously since its establishment in 1939. The Muckdogs, one of the teams disaffiliated in 2021, had been central to the life of the town for decades. For communities like Batavia, the local minor league ballpark meant cheerful shouts from kids playing catch in the shade of the bleachers, exuberant teenagers roaming about just as their parents had decades before, and grandparents bundled up to protect from the summer night’s chill.  

While the value of such happiness couldn’t be neatly quantified on an MLB spreadsheet — perhaps because happiness like that cannot be measured and marketed — the inefficiencies within the system or, in the words of potentate Manfred, the “stuff around the edges” that could be “cleaned up” to create “some economic flexibility that we can use.”

The small city in western New York between Rochester and Buffalo, Batavia was once full of heavy industry but has always been surrounded by fertile farmland, the local “mucklands” that inspired the team’s name. Prosperous in the first half of the twentieth century, Batavia began to struggle economically when the New York State Thruway bypassed Main Street, leading to the gradual death of many local businesses, as passing travelers no longer even knew they were there. Urban renewal projects, in which many of the historic old buildings along Main Street were bulldozed to make room for modern, brutalist style constructions, ravaged the once stately downtown. This was followed by the exit of much of its remaining industry in the 1980s and 90s.

Minor league baseball in Batavia was special in part because of what had been, at least on paper, its very ordinariness. The Muckdogs didn’t enjoy the highest attendance of the clubs that had been eliminated, nor had it been on the cutting edge of wacky baseball promotions like the Savannah Bananas.

In the wake of MLB’s cuts, Batavia refused to surrender baseball, rallying behind the creation of a new Muckdogs club, made up of amateur players competing in a summer collegiate league. With an extraordinary effort and much sacrifice from many people, driven by a community that would not allow its baseball team to disappear, Batavia survived. Pleasant summer evenings at the ballpark once seemed timeless but MLB’s craven decision put them on the endangered list. Through the vigorous efforts of its vibrant community, the crack of the bat will still be heard during the summer of 2025. Muckdogs fans of all ages will gather on warm summer evenings to overlook the tenderly manicured Dwyer Stadium.

The elitest billionaires are a mighty foe. But their fat bankrolls are not big enough to prevent Batavia’s dedicated fans from watching their beloved Muckdogs.

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

Will Bardenwerper served in Iraq as an Airborne Ranger-qualified infantry officer and was awarded a Combat Infantryman Badge and a Bronze Star. He has contributed to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other major publications. Before working in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, he earned a B.A. from Princeton University and an M.A. from Johns Hopkins University.

Buy “Homestand, Small Town Baseball and the Fight for the Soul of America” here. Mr. Bardenwerper’s other books are here.

Plyler v Doe Needs Reconsideration

By Joe Guzzardi

In Tennessee, controversial House Bill 793 and SB 836 that allow Tennessee school districts to deny enrollment to illegal alien students have taken another step toward becoming law. The bills would give permission to Tennessee schools to verify that, before enrolling them, children are citizens or have legal immigrant or visa status. Schools could then deny enrollment to the children who cannot prove their status or charge them tuition. The two versions differ in one key respect: the House bill makes it optional to check student immigration status. In the Senate version, immigration status checks are mandatory in Tennessee’s more than 1700 public schools and all public charter schools. The bills’ sponsors argued that the legislation is needed to both quantify the number of illegal alien students attending Tennessee schools and to protect the state’s limited financial resources. Opponents protested that the bill violates constitutional protections, particularly the 1982 U.S. Supreme Court ruling Plyler v. Doe, which guarantees access to public education regardless of immigration status.

On both sides of the aisle, passions ran high. House Democratic Caucus Chair John Ray Clemmons slammed the bill, and repeated clichés like, “Our country has a broken immigration system” and that the bill is about “punishing innocent children.” During the committee hearing, from the GOP side, Rep. Monty Fritts said, “We’re not talking about immigrants, we’re talking about illegals. There’s a distinct difference. There is no greater act of rebellion in these U.S. than illegally coming across that border.” The National Immigration Law Center issued a statement after the Senate vote that called the action a “shameful attempt to take away Tennessee children’s freedom.” The immigration advocacy firm is, it said, “prepared to defend the right to education for all alongside our partners in court.”

In June 2024, the Federation of American Immigration Reform wrote that under Plyler v. Doe, local schools are obligated to provide illegal alien children with a taxpayer-funded K-12 education. The cost is staggering. The nation’s price tag for educating illegal aliens’ children in 2022 was $70.8 billion. The data preceded the historic illegal immigrant surge that began in 2021 when President Joe Biden took office. Using Florida Rep. Aaron Bean’s conservative estimate of 500,000 new illegal aliens in U.S. public schools, the recent influx has added at least $9.7 billion in additional taxpayer costs. Bean chairs the Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education, and summed up Plyler v. Doe’s effect on the nation’s classrooms in two words: “Wreaking havoc.”

Parents’ frustration with the ever-expanding illegal aliens’ enrollment is understandable. Every teacher minute spent with a non-English speaking student, some of whom come in and out of the classroom depending on their parents’ work obligations, is one less moment spent with a citizen pupil. The Nation’s Report Card which showed sharp declines in reading and math scores for 9-year-olds, is attributable to, at least in part, the steady arrival of non-English speaking pupils.

Plyler v. Doe must take into consideration the nation’s current population levels. In 1982, the year SCOTUS handed down its ruling, the U.S. had 232 million residents including roughly sixteen million legal and illegal immigrants. A Center for Immigration Studies analysis showed that government’s January 2025 Current Population Survey (CPS) fixed the foreign-born or legal and illegal immigrant population at 53.3 million and 15.8 percent of the total U.S. population— both new record highs. The January CPS is the first government survey adjusted to better reflect the recent surge in illegal immigrants. Unlike border statistics, the CPS measures the number of immigrants in the country, which is what determines their impact on society including education. Without adjusting for those the survey missed, the estimated illegal immigrant population accounted for 5.4 million or two-thirds of the 8.3 million increase in the foreign-born population since January 2021. CIS’ best estimate is that 11.5 to 12.5 million legal and illegal immigrants settled in the country in the last four years.

Given the dramatic illegal immigration surge over the last 40 years, states’ request to reevaluate Plyler v. Doe is a modest proposal. States spend billions to educate Limited English Proficiency (LEP) students while citizen children get less of their teachers’ attention. In the meantime, while Plyler v. Doe review plays out in the courts, the federal government, which writes and approves immigration law, should pay for states’ illegal aliens’ education, an unfunded mandate. The bills’ sponsors have said they hope the legislation could serve as a test case for the Supreme Court to revisit its 1982 Plyler v. Doe decision. “If Plyler v. Doe were to stand, the federal government might finally step up and send the states the money to fund these students,” said a GOP representative. On LEP programs, Congress contributes barely 1 percent of the cost despite the federal requirement for states to educate the children of illegal aliens. Congress’ indifference to citizen children’s diluted education while it funds an ongoing illegal immigrant surge into already overcrowded classrooms represents yet another America last policy.

Joe Guzzardi is an Institute for Sound Public Policy analyst. Contact him at jguzzardi@ifspp.org

Plyler v Doe Needs Reconsideration Plyler v Doe Needs Reconsideration