Category: Guest Authors

Labor Force Participation Rate Falling, Bigger Drop Coming

By Joe Guzzardi

Dramatic footage taken recently that showed thousands of migrants crossing the Rio Grande River, and walking into El Paso represents compelling evidence that the Biden administration’s immigration policy is out of control. A massive Border Patrol facility in El Paso erected to ensure immigrants were not detained outside in the elements has blown past its four-digit capacity. Hundreds of people were left to endure near-freezing temperatures, and to sleep on the street with small campfires their only warmth. Since December 12, El Paso border patrol agents have interdicted more than 10,000 aliens, as per data city officials shared. 

But the videos tell only a portion of the current immigration muddle. The other part of federal immigration policy plays out behind the scene in the abyss of obscure immigration legislation that gets little media play even though all Americans, especially workers, are directly affected. 

In early December, mostly unnoticed, President Biden and his Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas extended Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to about 337,000 aliens from Haiti, Nepal, Sudan, Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. Originally slated to leave the U.S. on December 31, TPS holders got a re-up from DHS. The agency prolonged their residency period and their work permits until June 20, 2024, a benefit that allows them to compete with Americans in the U.S. labor force. In July, Biden extended TPSfor Syrians just as he had done previously for Cameroonians and Venezuelans before that. Again, more work permits all around—granted by executive decree. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services lists 16 nations that have been granted TPS including some countries hostile to the U. S.— Afghanistan, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela and Yemen.

From the macro perspective —the physical immigration component at the open border, and the administrative giveaways from Capitol Hill— working-age migrants are crossing undeterred, and the TPS community is rewarded with employment permission. By the time Biden’s first term ends, millions of foreign nationals will have work permits. Only the smallest fraction of the illegal immigrants “temporarily” protected or the illegal border crossers, many of whom will eventually receive asylum or parole, will return home. Instead, they’ll become a permanent part of the U.S. labor force. Those who don’t received federally authorized employment permits may work in the underground economy, ordered by Mayorkas as off-limits to Immigration and Customs Enforcement that might otherwise begin removal actions.

Rushing to provide work permission on a large scale to the newly U.S. settled worldwide immigrant population is terrible timing, and will have severe long-term labor implications. In addition to the estimated 6.5 million illegal immigrants who will have entered the U.S. during Biden’s four years in the White House, the administration has increased TPS recipients by 500,000. 

With the U.S. labor market struggling, adding thousands of work authorized immigrants will make employment conditions tougher for Americans. When the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that in November the economy created 263,000 jobs, the media was euphoric. But, buried in the news was the telling fact that the labor force participation rate had dropped to 62.1 percent from 63.4 percent nine months ago. The share of people working remains below pandemic levels.

An October Wall Street Journal story reported that 4.5 million Americans are working two jobs to keep apace with inflation. A Prudential Financial Inc. survey that the Journal also published found that 81% of Gen-Z and 77% of millennial workers said they have pursued gig work or are considering extra side work this year “to supplement their income…”

A dramatic influx of work authorized legal and illegal immigrants will exacerbate the problem that 100 million Americans are classified as “not in the labor force.” Moreover, one in six prime working age men, 25-54, has no paid work at all, a condition that economist Nicholas Eberstadt calls the rise of the “non-working class,” and its associated despair, “America’s invisible crisis.”

Biden’s multi-layered assault on U.S. workers—his welcome the world open borders that will include employment authorization and his administratively granted work permission for TPS designees demonstrates his callous disregard for American workers and their families.

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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.

Labor Force Participation Rate Falling, Bigger Drop Coming

Southwest Border Is An Environmental Crisis

By Joe Guzzardi

Ask the millions of migrants who have either entered the United States or are lined up at the border what motivated their journeys, and all will answer that they’re in pursuit of the proverbial better life. Translated, a better life means they’re longing to become consumers—consumers of housing, hard goods like cars, and natural resources such as water, electricity and natural gas. The migrants’ goal is great news for big businesses that never met a consumer they don’t love, but bad news for environmentalists who hope to preserve a vanishing America. As conservationists look ahead, the future they see is unsettling.

With Title 42 set to expire on December 21st, U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales, (R-TX) whose district includes 42 percent of the Texas-Mexico border predicts a “hurricane” of illegal immigration. Everyone in his district, Gonzales said, is in “batten down the hatches” mode as they await a historic and unmanageable increase in migration—more eventual consumers. Border patrol agents advised Uvalde residents to expect about 150 daily migrant drop offs indefinitely, evidence which, Gonzales said, proves that the Biden administration has no meaningful plan to cope with the ongoing invasion. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Title 42 has been enforced since March 2020 to expel migrants at the southern border. But, in November, in his 49-page opinion, U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan, President Bill Clinton’s appointee, ruled that Title 42 is “arbitrary and capricious,” and violated federal regulatory law.

For FY 2022, an estimated 5.5 million aliens, a total that includes the 4.4 million that CBP reported, and 1.1 million gotaways, are in the U.S. interior. Princeton Policy Advisors’ analyst Steven Kopits, who correctly predicted the FY 2022 crisis, wrote that “… based on the last two months [October and November], 2023 should set yet another record for illegal border crossing — and by a substantial margin over 2022.” March, April and May 2023 will be, Koptis concluded, especially high as part of the illegal immigrant siege. Only if Republicans captured both congressional chambers, Kopits envisioned, could the migrant invasion be halted—wishful thinking as the mid-term results were tallied.

The red tsunami that Kopits saw as the vehicle that might level off illegal immigration turned out to be a mere trickle. The House will have a narrow margin, and the Senate remains under Democratic control. All 50 senators have, since 2020, an unbroken voting record that supports open borders. Many of those senators are captives of the corporate donor class that wants the steady stream of consumers to continue unabated.

Environmentalists should be front and center in the battle to preserve the nation’s green space and irreplaceable resources. But not only have congressional Democrats abandoned limiting immigration to sustainable levels, but environmentalists have also given up the battle. Although population surges destroy the ecosystems, wildlife habitat, and farmland that exists between their cities and towns, no large environmental group today advocates for saving natural habitat from relentless growth. The Census Bureau projects that by mid-century, immigrants and births to immigrants will drive more than 85% of U.S. population growth, and add more than 100 million people to its current 333 million population.

American has one of the world’s largest ecological per capita footprints, 8.04.  Any and all U.S population growth— let alone the massive multi-million-person border surge–will grow its existing footprint. The average U.S. citizen’s ecological footprint is about 50 percent larger than that of the average person in most European countries. The nation has more suburban sprawl and less public transportation than most countries, which means it burns more fossil fuels that adds to its per-capita carbon consumption, and uses more energy and water per person than most other developed countries.

No one in the Biden administration or in Congress or among the major environmental organizations has meaningfully addressed the open border’s long-term consequences even though they are potentially dire. E.O. Wilson, biologist and writer, expressed the ecological threat dramatically, but accurately: “The raging monster upon the land is population growth. In its presence, sustainability is but a fragile theoretical concept.”

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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.

Southwest Border Is An Environmental Crisis

Umpire Augie Donatelli Learned Trade In POW Camp

By Joe Guzzardi

During World War II, 130,000 American soldiers and nearly 19,000 U.S. civilians were prisoners of war. In all but the worst circumstances, usually the Japanese camps where POWs lived in brutally inhumane conditions, a little recreation was possible, and baseball was the preferred pastime.

In his book, “POW Baseball in World War II,” author Tom Wolter tells the stories of baseball played behind barbed wire in the most unlikely places that included Central Asia, along the Baltic Seacoast, in Indonesian jungles and in Japanese cities where guards challenged prisoners to games. Refusal would have been dangerous.

Games were played, said one POW, to avoid crushing boredom, and to create a “Little America.” Within the camps, the players formed leagues, and rivalries were intense. Umpiring disputes were heated, and ringer roster-stacking allegations common. Prison-run newspapers detailed the games in prose that would have made Damon Runyon proud.

Among those liberated from POW camps was Army Air Force Sergeant Augie Donatelli, a future National League umpire. Stationed in England with the 379th Bomb Group as a tail-gunner on a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, one of the Air Force’s most dangerous jobs, Donatelli’s plane, during the first daylight mission over Berlin, was shot down. Looking back, Donatelli said that “fighters [were] diving at us, 20-millimeter shells exploding all around. We flew into the clouds to hide. What action! That day 68 bombers were shot down.”

Donatelli, who previously had flown 17 successful missions, parachuted out but broke his ankle when he hit the ground. Trying to escape from the forest after his fall, Donatelli recalled that he heard a Nazi soldier yell, “Halt,” and was soon a Stalag Luft IV POW.

During his 14 months as a POW, Donatelli tried to escape twice, but was recaptured. Former National League umpire and friend Doug Harvey later recalled, “He always laughed when he talked about his second attempt. He was hiding in a haystack, but didn’t get all the way in. His rear was showing. One of the German guards got him out with a pitchfork.”

As a young boy, Donatelli, the son of Italian immigrants, worked in Western Pennsylvania’s coal mines. Donatelli told the Society for American Baseball’s Oral History Committee, “It was dangerous and hard work, but what else were you going to do? I started even before graduating from high school.” But Donatelli began his 24-year career, which ended with him universally regarded as one of baseball history’s best umpires, when he presided over POW softball games.

Before Donatelli enlisted, something he said that his patriotic spirit compelled him to do, he had played shortstop in the Class D league for the St. Louis Browns. But Gus, as Donatelli’s friends called him, sensed that his skills weren’t up to MLB snuff. After graduating from umpire school, his new career began, and soon, he was umpiring in the big leagues where he became famous for his quick hook and the dramatic gestures that accompanied it.

By the time he retired, Donatelli had worked four All-Star games, five World Series, two League Championship Series. Donatelli was also behind the plate for four no-hitters, as well as when Whitey Ford set the World Series record for scoreless innings, 32, when Don Drysdale got the single season consecutive shutout innings in a season, 58, when Stan Musial hit five homers in a doubleheader, and when “The Man” got his 3,000th base hit, and when Nate Colbert hit five homers and had the most RBIs, 13, in a doubleheader.

In 1970, Donatelli helped organize the Major League Umpires Association which eventually led to today’s umpires earning an average $235,000 salary. When Donatelli looked back at his career, he pointed with pride to missing only one game in 24 years, and his patriotic World War II service; “I felt it was something I had to do, not to escape the mines but because you just felt it was up to you to get into it.” At age 75, Donatelli died at home in St. Petersburg, Fl.

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

Umpire Augie Donatelli Learned Trade In POW Camp