Category: Guest Authors

Alert US Military Thwarts Would-Be Terrorists

By Joe Guzzardi

In a high stakes gamble with Americans’ safety and security at risk, President Joe Biden is rolling the dice again. Capitol Hill insiders confirm that the administration is considering providing refugee status to Palestinians from the Gaza Strip via mass parole, an immigration authority the president has abused since he entered the White House. The Immigration and Nationality Act requires that parole status be granted only on a temporary, case-by-case basis to satisfy a compelling, urgent humanitarian need. In blatant violation of the INA, Biden has doled out parole en bloc to millions of illegal immigrants.

The Biden administration has amassed a long list of illegal, unconstitutional immigration crimes that endanger the public. Top among them is his red-carpet welcome to an unknown total of millions—perhaps ten million or more—of unvetted illegal aliens whose backgrounds and intentions are unknown. Municipalities have struggled to provide shelter, health care, education and other affirmative benefits to illegally present foreign nationals. So far, Biden has luckily avoided a terrorist attack, but his good fortune is running out. During FY 2023, 736 known or suspected terrorists were apprehended at either the northern or southern border. The gotaways, an estimated 1.6 million over a three year period, doubtlessly include dozens more terrorists.

The nation now knows that at least one likely active terrorist, a Jordanian national who crossed the California/Mexico border illegally in May, recently breached Virginia’s Marine Corp Base Quantico in a box truck. Accompanied by another Jordanian national whose F-1 student visa expired in May, another immigration crime that converts his temporary visa status to illegal immigrant, the pair claimed that they were Amazon subcontractors making a delivery. Amazon had no knowledge of the Jordanians as employees or subcontractors. DHS refuses to release the Jordanians names; the FBI and ICE are mum. But Dave Katz, a former DEA agent and federal firearms instructor at Quantico, warned that the box truck incident was likely “a dry run for driving a box truck that was not going to be empty the second time.” Katz called the failed attempt the Jordanians “equivalent of a feasibility study.”

The Jordanians are not DHS’s only national security concern. In North Carolina, two non-English speaking, illegal alien Chechen men were caught trespassing past sunset outside a U.S. Army Special Operations Command officer’s home. The men had cell phones with Russian language contacts.  One, Ramzan Daraev, claimed to work as a subcontractor for Utilities One, but had neither electrical equipment nor identification. Utilities One is a foreign-registered New Jersey-based company founded in 2016 by a young Moldovan CEO three years after he moved to the U.S.

When confronted near a power line in a wooded part of the property, an altercation ensued, and the Army officer shot and killed Daraev. Authorities questioned the second Chechen, Dzhankutov Adsalan and, despite being illegally present in the U.S., released him. The violated Special Op’s family told news outlets that the Chechens were photographing their children. To call the Quantico and North Carolina incidents suspicious, threatening and a threat to national security is an understatement.

Despite the frightening Jordanian and Moldovan incidents as well as the 30,000 unvetted Chinese who have surged the border but that no White House official cares about, Biden seems determined to invite more trouble. Accepting Gazan refugees would heighten national security risks to levels not seen since before 9/11. Before taking the drastic step that would admit Gazans as refugees, give them work permits, and put them on a path to citizenship, Biden and the State Department should familiarize themselves with an analysis The Washington Institute for Near East Policy published, “Teaching Terror, How Hamas Radicalizes Palestine.” The institute concluded that Hamas successfully radicalizes Palestinians not only to support and fund but to facilitate and participate in the group’s terrorist attacks. More than 25 years ago in 1997, the State Department designated Hamas as a terrorist organization. And even though Hamas is an organization that calls itself a local resistance group, it unsurprisingly targets foreign audiences from America to Malaysia with its web-based terrorist messages. Hamas raises the vast majority of its $2 billion annual budget abroad, including generous funding from Iran, United Nations agencies and so-called charitable groups.

Two-term Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), who served in the Iraq War and spent 23 years in the Army Reserve and the Army National Guard, wrote a pointed letter to Biden which 34 Republican Senators co-signed that demanded a full accounting of his Gazan refugee vision. Biden, to quote Ernst, “is blowing off my work to prevent an Oct. 7-related attack on our own shores.” The White House referred Ernst’s letter to the Department of Homeland Security which further blew her off with the false promise that “Any individuals from Gaza who have traveled or would travel to the U.S. are thoroughly vetted, as the safety and security of the American people is our top priority.” The reality is that the administration has no intention to track, much less remove dangerous actors posing as refugees. A new Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General report revealed how it has already failed to track the 77,000 Afghan refugees admitted into the country. The consequences of the Afghan withdrawal blunder remain to be seen.

Biden has hands full enough without tempting fate further with Gazan refugees. The White House’s first obligation is to rescue American citizens, not Gazans.

Joe Guzzardi is an Institute for Sound Public Policy analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at jguzzardi@ifspp.org

Alert US Military Thwarts Would-Be Terrorists Alert US Military Thwarts Would-Be Terrorists

The 1924 Immigration Act From A 2024 Lens

By Joe Guzzardi

A century ago, President Calvin Coolidge signed the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, also known as the Immigration Act of 1924, which precipitated a two-generation-long pause in mass migration. Upon Coolidge’s signature, multiple benefits to citizen workers ensued immediately. Immigration dropped from 707,000 in 1924 to 294,000 in 1925. Within a year, more than 400,000 fewer job seekers entered the U.S. During the next 45 years, the same time length as the Great Wave which lasted from 1870 to 1924, immigration averaged 200,000 annually, dramatically less than earlier totals.

The immigration pause meant that those who arrived during the Great Wave had time to assimilate into a stronger, more cohesive nation. Monetary benefits—higher wages— accrued to blue-collar workers, and especially to black laborers who prospered at an even faster rate than their white contemporaries.  Black American leaders have been historically onboard with significant immigration reductions. Of course they are. Basic economics 101 dictates that a tight labor supply is good for workers. When the 1924 act cut off the large supply of foreign-born labor, employers had nowhere to turn except to American workers who they had previously underpaid and subjected to often abysmal on-the-job conditions. And without Congress authorizing a continuous stream of foreign labor into eastern and Mid-Atlantic factories and steel mills, roughly six million southern blacks migrated north to take advantage of newly created job opportunities. W.E.B. DuBois wrote in the 1929 issue of the NAACP magazine The Crisis that the 1924 legislation’s “stopping…the importing of cheap white labor on any terms has been the economic salvation of American Black labor.”

In 2020, the Brookings Institution issued a paper titled “Examining the Black-White Wealth Gap” that chronicled U.S. history’s multiple examples of black earnings being denied before it had a chance to grow and create generational wealth. At the time of the Brookings’ study’s publication, median black household wealth was less than six percent of white wealth. African American households, Brookings found, had too few net assets to withstand even temporary financial setbacks. A major cause that prevented blacks from moving up the economic ladder was more than fifty years of high immigration that began with the Hart-Cellar Immigration Act of 1965, which loosened labor markets and kicked off another immigration Great Wave which endures today.

One hundred years after Coolidge, immigration is more contentious than at any other point in American history. President Joe Biden’s immigration agenda represents the worst of worlds. Millions of unvetted illegal immigrants, of which a significant percentage are working age males, have crossed the U.S. border apparently with few marketable skills in today’s technology-oriented society. Most seem to have come to the U.S. in need of affirmative benefits, or perhaps the benefits were the incentive. The consequences of Biden’s welcome-the-world immigration agenda are reflected in the Census’ report that the U.S.’s foreign-born population hit 46.2 million or 13.9 percent of the overall population in 2022, an all-time high. In 1970, the foreign-born numbered 9.6 million or 4.7 percent of the total U.S. population.

The largest population percentage increases from 2021 to 2022 by country were Afghanistan, up 229 percent; Venezuela, up 22 percent; Honduras, Nepal, and Kenya, each up 10 percent; Ghana, Brazil, and Colombia, each up 9 percent; and Ethiopia and Ecuador, both up 8 percent. The Center for Immigration Studies compiled the data which it collected from publicly available federal statistics. Too many people arriving in too short a period strains vital social services like medical care and education and depletes irreplaceable natural resources like water and agricultural land, exactly the outcome that the 1924 legislation prevented.

Because it imposed national quotas that favored northern Europeans and excluded other nations, the 1924 act was flawed. But its intention to reduce immigration to manageable levels was not. The 1924 Congress expressed the noble desire that the nation grow at a slower, more sustainable pace and that its citizens’ needs be prioritized. Since Biden and his inside circle have different, nefarious objectives, legislation like the Immigration Act of 1924 won’t happen during what remains of the president’s term. Even truly securing the border may be too much to hope for, but it would be a good starting point.

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

The 1924 Immigration Act From A 2024 Lens

VP Sweepstakes Coming into Final Stretch

By Joe Guzzardi

Former President Donald J. Trump is tied up a Manhattan court room but he’s active online. One of his fund-raising efforts asks his supporters to help him choose his Vice President. In a mass email, Trump asked “Which person would you select as your next Vice President? Type in the person’s name here.” Trump will make up his own mind, but the potential candidates list is long, and his choice is important. A significant faction of registered GOP voters dubious about Trump’s candidacy could be swayed toward the former president based on his VP selection. Even though Nikki Haley abandoned her presidential campaign in early March after losing all but one state in Super Tuesday’s primary races, she’s still managed to clinch 13%-18% of the GOP electorate in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Haley’s performance causes GOP insiders to question whether her supporters will ultimately back Trump, cross party lines or simply stay home.

Trump’s VP will, if history holds, debate Kamala Harris on September 25 at Lafayette College, a key event that follows the first scheduled presidential debate, September 16 at Texas State University. A look back: The first vice presidential debate occurred in 1976 between two seasoned Senators, Kansas’ Bob Dole and Minnesota’s Walter Mondale. The exchanges were lively; Mondale called Ford “a hatchet-man.” Both were veteran politicians, tough and loyal, Dole to the right politically of incumbent President Gerald Ford and Mondale to the left of the challenger, Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter.

Among the names being bandied about are three U.S. Senators: Ohio’s J.D. Vance, Florida’s Marco Rubio and South Carolina’s Tim Scott, as well as U.S. Reps. Byron Scott (R-Fla.) and Elise Stefanik (R-NY). Forget them. If Trump wins, he’ll need every congressional supporting vote he can get; to remove five certain yeas from Congress on his agenda would be folly. Another name mentioned is also a highly unlikely choice. Although Trump flew North Dakota Governor and one-time 2024 presidential hopeful Doug Burgum to his Wildwood, New Jersey rally, the moderate is, like the presumptive nominee, an old, white billionaire. North Dakota has three electoral votes, and in 2016 and 2020 Trump won the state by a 2:1 ratio. Trump would gain nothing from an electoral college angle if he added Burgum to the ticket.

That narrows the prospects down to Tulsi Gabbard who, in many ways, is an ideal VP choice. Gabbard is young, attractive, well-spoken, a former four-term House Democrat, an Iraq War veteran who has served in the Army since 2003 and was promoted to Major in 2015. In 2022, Gabbard abandoned the Democratic Party because of its shift to the far-left, or as she put it, is “now under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness, who divide us by racializing every issue and stoke anti-white racism, undermines Americans’ God-given freedoms, demonizes the police but protects criminals, encourages open borders, weaponizes national security for politics’ sake, and pushes the country ever closer to nuclear war.” In further explaining her decision to switch to the Independent Party, Gabbard added that she believes in a government that is of, by, and for the people. Unfortunately, she continued, today’s Democratic Party does not.” The 2020 presidential hopeful gave the keynote speech in March at Mar-a-Lago to the 1917 Society, a volunteer group dedicated to preserving the Constitution.

However, on voters’ top concern, immigration, Gabbard’s grade while she was in the House was as bad as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, F-. Gabbard was on the wrong side of every important immigration issue; she voted against stronger border and interior enforcement, and in favor of expanding worker visas that displace employed Americans. Her congressional votes showed that, at the time she cast them, she encouraged amnesty enticements and rewarded illegal aliens. Another irrevocable negative: Gabbard endorsed Bernie Sanders in 2016 and, after she ended her own presidential campaign, Biden in 2020.

Should Gabbard’s dismal congressional immigration voting record and her past presidential endorsements surface in her debate against Harris, the Hawaiian could point to her recent criticism of Biden’s open borders, her support of Israel and, in general, her more traditional values and say she’s evolved politically and socially since becoming an Independent. Trump promises to name his VP before the GOP national convention in Milwaukee, July 15-18. In the end, he may not choose Gabbard, but he absolutely cannot remove any of his congressional allies.

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

VP Sweepstakes Coming into Final Stretch

Remembering Pat Tillman

By Joe Guzzardi

Arizona State University and Arizona Cardinals’ safety Pat Tillman shocked the sports world when, in 2002, he walked away from a $3.6 million professional football contract to join the U.S. Army Rangers. Tillman, who attended ASU on an athletic scholarship, had been a first-team All-American and Pac-10 Defensive Player of the Year in 1997. By 2000, two years after he joined the Cardinals, Sports Illustrated named Tillman to its NFL All-Pro team. But eight months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Tillman and his brother Kevin enlisted in the Army and completed basic training together.  Pat then fulfilled the Ranger Assessment & Selection Program requirements and was assigned to the 2^nd Ranger Battalion in Ft. Lewis, Washington. Tillman was deployed and participated in the initial invasion of Iraq, what became known as Operation Iraqi Freedom. One year later, Tillman entered Ranger School and, upon finishing his training in November 2003, was shipped to Afghanistan.

On April 22, 2004, Tillman and Afghan allied soldier Sayed Farhad were killed by Afghan enemy combatants in a firefight near the Pakistan border —or so the official and ultimately proven false story went. The Army issued a purposely deceptive statement about the circumstances surrounding Tillman’s death. As Tillman was leading his team to help comrades caught in an ambush, the Army claimed he was fatally shot while fighting “without regard for his personal safety.”

Weeks after Tillman’s burial, the U.S. Army Criminal Investigative Division (CID) investigated the incident and concluded that Tillman and Farhad were killed by “friendly fire.” The lengthy coverup included the Army’s order to Tillman’s fellow Army soldiers to lie to his peers about the circumstances that led to the two deaths. Tillman’s mother Mary and his father Patrick were heartbroken when they heard the truth, something they suspected since the Army had been tight-lipped when they pressed for the details that surrounded their son’s final moments. Tillman’s family and other critics insisted that the President George W. Bush and his Department of Defense didn’t want negative press with a re-election campaign soon to get underway. In her congressional testimony, Tillman’s mother said: “The deception surrounding this case was an insult to the family, but more importantly, its primary purpose was to deceive a whole nation.” Ironically, just days before he was killed, Tillman told the Washington Post that the U.S.’s invasion and occupation of Iraq was illegal and immoral.

In a 2021 op-ed, Tillman’s brother Kevin railed against the government’s craven disinformation campaign waged against Pat’s memory and condemned America’s forever wars. Kevin opined that the Iraq invasion began with a barrage of administration lies about Saddam’s supposed supply of weapons of mass destruction, his reputed links to al-Qaeda, and the idea that American soldiers were liberating the Iraqi people. Some of the troops were assigned to run around Baghdad, “east, west, south, and north somewhat,” looking for nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. In his column, Kevin wrote that the invasion was “catastrophic,” and resulted in Iraqi society’s destruction, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of American soldiers, even Iraq’s leadership was removed and its military disbanded—mission accomplished, in President George W. Bush’s eyes. Neither Bush nor the rest of his top officials were held responsible for what happened.

Tillman was 27 when he was killed in a futile, senseless war. In his wartime journals, he repeatedly wrote of the strength he drew from his family, friendships, and from his high school sweetheart and eventual wife Marie Ugenti. Shortly before his deployment to Iraq, Tillman wrote a “just in case” letter to his wife for her to open in the event of his death. The letter sat on their bedroom dresser for months before the fateful day arrived. Tillman’s final request: “I ask that you live.” Ugenti wrote a book titled “The Letter: My Journey through Love, Loss and Life.” Ugenti has remarried and, with her new husband, has five children. She also chairs the Pat Tillman Foundation, a non-profit that provides academic scholarships to military service members and their spouses.

Posthumously promoted from specialist to corporal, Tillman was also awarded the Silver Star and the Purple Heart. The accolades are cold comfort to Tillman’s family and friends. A non-profit

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

Remembering Pat Tillman