Atlanta Massacre Shows Border, Interior Security Needed
By Joe Guzzardi
With stronger border and seaport enforcement, and with more vigorous Immigration and Customs Enforcement and FBI interior policing, last week’s massacre across several Atlanta massage parlors may never have happened. The immigration status of the deceased victims is as yet unknown; they may be U.S. citizens. Six of the eight killed were, reported the Associated Press, Asian, ranging in age from 33 to 74, seven women and one man.
Nevertheless, the harsh fact remains: deprived of trafficked and exploited illegal immigrants to hire, owners/operators, some also illegally present, could not manage their thriving massage parlor business as they do today – mostly unchecked. Finding the businesses isn’t hard; they’re listed in the phone book and are Internet accessible. Customers have no trouble seeking out the massage parlors, but, for the most part, law enforcement has a hands-off attitude.
Well-known for years is that international sex trafficking into the U.S. is an illegal but lucrative business and that many of the young women smuggled end up as prostitutes working under the flimsy guise of being masseuses. No one knows exactly how many illegitimate massage parlors operate in the U.S., but the total could be tens of thousands. Cities with populations as small as 50,000 often have several so-called spas, all open for business from early morning until late at night.
In his evening television program, Tucker Carlson advised that when his staff did an Internet search, it found more massage parlors than Starbucks in the neighborhood housing the Gold Spa, Aromatherapy Spa and Young’s Asian Spa where the shootings occurred. The Department of Justice announced that, “Atlanta is a major transportation hub for trafficking young girls,” and is “one of the 14 U.S. cities with the highest levels of child sex trafficking.”
Throughout Georgia, 165 illicit massage businesses have been identified that provide sexual services to at least 1,000 customers daily, and generate $42 million in annual gross revenue. The U.S. Department of Justice Human Trafficking Task Force found that the average victim is first exploited for commercial sex between the ages of 12 to 14. Experts claim that traffickers take advantage of different countries’ maritime law discrepancies to easily smuggle their victims and eventually make huge profits. By land or by sea, human exploitation is big business. The International Labor Organization estimates that the 25 million global victims generate about $150 billion in annual profits for the criminal organizers.
Victims are relocated in a foreign country where they cannot speak the language. Traffickers frequently take away the victims’ travel and identity documents, telling them that if they attempt to escape, their families back home will be harmed, or the victims’ families will be forced to assume their debt. Men, women and children that are encountered in brothels, sweat shops, massage parlors, agricultural fields and other labor markets may be forced or coerced into those situations and potentially are trafficking victims.
According to the Department of State, the U.S. is the preferred destination for thousands of men, women and children globally trafficked and lured into illegal sexual practices and labor abuses. Many are enticed from their homes with false promises of well-paying jobs. But once they arrive, they are forced or coerced into prostitution, domestic servitude, or menial farm and factory labor.
Former Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, U.S. Ambassador to China from 2017 to 2020, received a letter from a fellow Iowan who described how smugglers typically ply their trade. In 2017, Branstad’s correspondent met with a young Asian woman jailed in Iowa on prostitution charges. She had no family nearby, and spoke only Mandarin. Through a translator, the woman told her story: an adult woman who promised her wealth and security as a U.S.-based massage therapist brought her to Las Vegas on an easily obtained tourist visa.
Within a few weeks, the victim was sent to Atlanta, and then to Los Angeles where she was told she’d have to pay off her transportation expenses by first working at a local massage parlor, and then at a Northern California spa. Eventually, she was sent to Iowa, and placed at yet another massage parlor. In the unlikely event that any federal agency might have been pursuing her, the victim with the help of the perpetrators was always one step ahead of law enforcement.
The U.S. is the smuggler’s preferred destination because sneaking in is comparatively easy, the payoffs are high, and the likelihood of being apprehended and prosecuted is slim. Sex trafficking awareness is increasing; the FBI has a hotline to phone in suspected crimes. But so far, no significant dent has been made to stop felonious human smuggling. Ramped-up border and aggressive interior security is needed, and the Biden administration should, in light of the Atlanta tragedy, make enforcement its top priority.
Joe Guzzardi is a Progressives for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org.
Atlanta Massacre Shows Border, Interior Security Needed
Atlanta Massacre Shows Border, Interior Security Needed
Like all the best things in life, Donald Trump’s presidency was over too quickly. If there’s one thing I regret about his reelection campaign, it’s that I didn’t take more pictures. I mean, I took a ton of pictures—it’s what I do. But I wish I’d gotten more candid shots of his supporters, like the ones below. I don’t really like posed portraits of people, because the emotion captured in a shot for which the subject was unprepared can’t be depicted when you ask them to freeze, put aside whatever they’re actually feeling, and plaster on a smile for your camera.
A little patriot at the Stop the Steal Rally, Nov. 7, in Harrisburg. Photo byOlivia Braccio
I’m not a mind-reader, just a photographer. I’m not sure what these subjects—none of whom I know personally—were feeling. I can imagine it was the tentative optimism we all shared. But I wonder if anyone else knew deep down that Trump would not be getting a second term. I didn’t want to say it then—I’m American with Italian roots; having come from a superstitious culture, it’s been implied to me that speaking something aloud can make it happen. But I knew. And it wasn’t the first time I felt that horrible weight in my gut, the sinking feeling of knowing a truth you so badly don’t want to accept. Some things are too good to be true. I knew Donald Trump’s second term was one of them. Some things do not happen twice.
My first thought when I wake up every morning is how much I wish Donald Trump were still president. Although we’re distraught that he didn’t get to finish what he started, I am as grateful for the time he spent being our leader as I am disappointed that it couldn’t last. I am thankful not only to President Trump himself, but for the fact that I was here to see all of this. Most lifespans are less than one hundred years. Considering this, I am almost in disbelief that I was fortunate enough to have my existence coincide with his. It dawned on me recently that had I been born a couple generations earlier or a generation later, I would have missed his presidency. I would have missed the greatest thing that ever happened for the United States. Each of us who supported him got to vote for him twice. We got to attend his rallies. Some of us were more involved than others, but we each got to play a part, however big or small, in the MAGA movement. At least we have that to carry with us moving forward.
From the Stop the Steal Rally, Nov. 7, in Harrisburg. Photo byOlivia Braccio
I cannot imagine the depth of the bereavement President Trump is feeling now as he watches his hard work being undone and his accomplishments being erased. We knew the Biden administration would be bad, but this is far worse than we’d imagined. If it’s this hard for us to witness, how much harder is it for the man who did everything in his power to prevent it? I hope the devastation our former president and his family must be feeling is tempered by the immense gratitude we have for them and the whole administration.
I hope Donald Trump’s main takeaway from his time as president is, simply, that he is loved. It sure didn’t always seem that way, but I hope that as he looked into the crowd at each of his rallies, he saw the appreciation we had for him illustrated on our faces. We saw his love for this country, we saw what he was doing for us. We know what he had to give up in order to serve the American people. We know he didn’t need to become president—he took the literal weight of the world onto his seventy-year-old shoulders not for himself, but for us. He could’ve spent the past five and a half years enjoying retirement in Mar-a-Lago. We know how hard it must’ve been to be a public servant—donating every penny of his salary—to constituents who make constant attempts to vilify him, who make threats on his life. But I hope he knows that along with every media source diminishing his efforts, along with every journalist who has labeled him a bigot, a sexist, or a Nazi, along with the people who hold up a replica of his severed head in effigy, the people who get the hashtag “wrong Trump” trending on Twitter in reference to his younger brother’s death, and the people wishing he would’ve succumbed to Covid, there are people who love him so profoundly that they drive three hours away to stand out on the shoulder of the road all day just to get a glimpse of his smiling face and bright yellow hair through the tinted window of a limousine. I always thought fanatical people were strange—what is there to be so excited about? A celebrity is just like anybody else.
From the Trump Rally in Old Forge, Pa on Aug. 20. Photo by Olivia Braccio
Until I was the one asking my mom to drive me to the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton airport after Trump’s private presentation was over, so I could watch the motorcade go by for a second time that day.
Until I was the overzealous nut—there’s always one, right?—standing in the front row with the Bikers for Trump, and screaming “WE LOVE YOU MOOOOOOORE!” to Eric Trump at his rally in the parking lot of Superior Laminating, each time he spoke of his affection for the president’s supporters.
Until my mother and I were driving all the way up to Waymart in the pouring rain to see Ivanka, and I was one of the people shoving a piece of paper at her and telling her how proud I was of her, and later hanging that autograph, framed, on my bedroom wall.
Until I was photographing Mike Pence during his rally at the Reading Airport, in awe as he jumped off the platform like someone half his age to come around and greet his fans. As I shouted that I was proud of him and watched him smile back, the irony was not lost on me—anyone who knows me will tell you I’m fairly reticent, rarely telling even close friends that I love them. But here I was, saying it freely to members of both Trump’s family and administration, all of whom were technically strangers to me.
What I found particularly touching was how involved Donald Trump’s children were with his presidency and reelection campaign. I loved the devotion that the Trump family showed to each other and to the US. Seeing each of them in person brought out the human side of politics, the side you don’t see when you’re watching the ten o’clock news or reading the latest tabloid. They weren’t just public figures, they weren’t just his advisors. They already had full lives long before their dad ran for president, with the same ups and downs that all of us experience. They were citizens serving their nation while keeping their young children out of the limelight and trying to maintain some semblance of privacy. They went from being well-liked, successful businesspeople to being under 24/7 Secret Service surveillance in only a few months’ time.
I don’t think there is a family in modern history who has had to face the kind of adversity the Trump family has, who has taken the kind of undue criticism they have had heaped upon them every day since 2015. Call them privileged all you want; what does money and fame mean when you’re living with the knowledge that there are people who have homicidal intent towards you? A certain amount of disparagement is expected when you get involved with politics, and of course neither Trump himself nor anyone else in his family or administration ever batted an eye, but nobody is immune to constant assaults on their character or the stress of having their safety jeopardized each time they left their homes—a scenario which should never have occurred in a so-called civilized society. After the initial riots following the 2016 elections, I’d hoped the Left would realize their mistake, begin using their eyes and heads, and start appreciating what President Trump was doing for our nation. It was only a couple of months later when I realized we wouldn’t see that happen. On the contrary, the threats from the “Hate Has No Home Here” crew became more vulgar, grew in both intensity and frequency. Did President Trump and his family find it as harrowing as I did? Did they deplane at each campaign stop wondering if that could be the day when a protestor with nefarious intent would somehow slip past security?
It’s sad to think of our president and first family working for our country under these circumstances; the fact that they performed their roles so well in spite of it all is a testament to their indomitable spirits and dedication to the US. I don’t understand when it became socially acceptable to wish death upon the leader of your own nation, or how violence against Trump supporters became such a common occurrence that some of us had to think twice before leaving the house in a hat bearing the name of the president. I don’t understand how it was seen as normal that business owners in major cities had to board up their windows at the end of October—were we preparing for an election or a natural disaster?
I hope the support the Trump family was shown at each of their rallies insulated them against these attacks. I hope the screams of their adoring fans was enough to drown out the hostility, the hurtful remarks that were spewed, and I wish they knew that the amount of love and gratefulness I alone had—and still have—for them is so much greater than the hatred that all the vitriolic people hold within their embittered souls combined, and I know the rest of President Trump’s supporters would express the exact same sentiments.
The anticipation in the months leading up to the election was as torturous as it was delightful. It was like sitting at a railroad crossing while a freight train was going by. Logically, you knew it had to end sometime, but as it chugged along in front of you, it almost seemed like there could be an infinite number of boxcars. And yet, somehow, it felt like I was searching for a pause button that I knew did not exist—I wanted to stay there, savoring the feeling of unity at each of Trump’s reelection events, of being with people who all shared a common goal. You would think that when you cram five to ten thousand people into an airport hangar, things would get contentious, but they didn’t. We passed around snacks, we gave up our seats for each other. I doubt I’ll ever find a way to recapture that pre-election excitement; although I sensed the impending catastrophe, the last shreds of my idealism were not entirely snuffed out until Biden’s inauguration. Now having experienced Biden’s leadership—or lack thereof—there is nothing I wouldn’t do to be able to go back to that segment of our lives, to pull a lever and halt the Earth’s rotations at any point before November third.
I have no doubt that President Trump is aware of how much we miss him. Having known this was coming for months, I wasn’t expecting the onslaught of grief that hit me when I saw President Trump and Melania leaving the white house for the last time. But as I watch Biden force National Guard troops to sleep in a parking garage, as I watch him send airstrikes to Syria, as I watch the destruction of the Keystone Pipeline and the erasure of women from sports, as I watch the crisis at the border escalate, and executive order after executive order pile up on his desk in less than two months’ time, I miss President Trump in the same frantic and desperate way I would miss oxygen if I were trapped underwater.
I miss everything about the Trump administration.
I miss having peace in the Middle East.
I miss energy independence.
I miss gas being two dollars per gallon.
I miss his Tweets!
I miss watching his State of the Union addresses.
I miss the backache from standing in line at each of those rallies. I miss the total stranger who, when she saw that I was starting to panic after being in line for seven hours at President Trump’s rally at the Harrisburg International Airport, began rubbing my back and talking to me to calm me down. I miss holding up the sign I had made out of a poster board and Sharpies, “Four More Years of Liberal Tears.” I miss being awestruck at the sight of Air Force One landing on the tarmac. I miss the sound of ten thousand voices all reciting the Pledge of Allegiance together. I miss the way my throat closed up with emotion when Melania came out on stage to address the crowd in Chester County just about a week prior to voting day. I miss sitting in the parking lot of the Upper Salford Volunteer Fire Company on a day that was about ninety-eightdegrees, in a metal chair on the asphalt, direct sunlight beating down on us, melting in the literal sense while waiting to see Lara Trump arrive with the Women for Trump bus tour.
I miss the Toby Keith songs they used to play at Trump-related events. Do I like country music? Not one bit. I miss it anyway.
But mostly, I just miss having hope for our nation’s future. I miss the security of knowing we had a commander in chief who put America first in all things, who worked tirelessly to protect his constituents from threats both domestic and foreign, even in the face of constant opposition from the Democratic party and even some members of the GOP.
I wish I could go back to election night, 2020, getting home after a long day working the polls, eating a pork roll sandwich in front of the computer and forcing myself to stay awake until five-thirty to watch the count come in, clinging to the nonsensical belief that as long as I didn’t fall asleep, as long as I kept refreshing the Google results, as long as my eyes did not close, President Trump would be declared the winner before daybreak.
I wish I could go back to election night, 2016. That morning had been my first time voting in a presidential election, and I was filled with twenty-year-old naivety that had not yet been smothered. I spent the day at the hospital in the city, fighting the urge to pace, to shake out the nervous energy consuming me as I sat still as a statue while the surgical resident drew dots on my face, took measurements in preparation for a maxillofacial surgery that would take place several months later. I remember waiting for the train during rush hour at 30th Street Station, looking around at everyone else and wondering if this was just another day for them, just another commute home, or if they were feeling the same tension of being perched on that metaphorical precipice. It was after two-thirty that night when Hillary called to concede. I burst into relieved sobs while the rest of the nation erupted in equal parts rage and euphoria.
I wish we could all go back to June sixteenth, 2015, the day President Trump announced his candidacy. As we watched him descend the escalator in Trump tower, Melania at his side, some of us were scratching our heads. I remembered watching The Apprentice as a kid with my mom, but I was too young to understand what was happening in the show, and I knew next to nothing about this man other than the fact that he was rich, famous, and lived in Manhattan. It wasn’t the first time a non-politician had run for president—we can’t forget Ronald Reagan—but that was way before I was born. So admittedly, my only thought that day was, how is a reality TV star supposed to run the country? How will Donald Trump do something like that?
With more efficiency, care, common sense, candor, and patriotism than anybody ever had before.
A tragedy occurred outside of Holtville, California, when a northbound big rig rammed into the driver’s side of an SUV that pulled out in front of the semi-truck, killing 13 people. This tragic event morphed into the surreal when we learned that the SUV was packed with 25 people who had been smuggled into the United States.
That’s right, 24 passengers and a driver packed like sardines in a vehicle designed to hold eight adults at maximum. Perhaps the driver who hailed from Mexicali, Mexico, was distracted when he pulled out in front of the semi making its way down Route 115. Anyone who has been in a Ford Expedition has to be thinking to themselves, HOW? How do you get 25 people into a vehicle like that?
Well, you start with ruthless, morally shipwrecked cartels that make steep profits trafficking humans across the border. Todd Bensman of the Center for Immigration Studies recently wrote that cartels expect to make $2,500 per individual smuggled from Mexico. When we do the math, that SUV had a human cargo valued around $60,000.
To give an example of just how revolting this incident is, one has to go back to the American slave trade in the 18th and 19th centuries. According to History.com, slave ships could be either “tight pack” or “loose pack.” A tight pack could hold more slaves than the loose pack, because the amount of space allocated to each slave was considerably less, but more slaves would die on route to the Americas. It would appear the cartels these days have chosen the tight pack model.
Next, you have to look at the people making the journey to enter the U.S. illegally. Coming from Mexico, they have to fork over the $2,500 and be willing to place their lives in the hands of unscrupulous smugglers. How many other deprivations do they suffer along the way, and what motivates them to do so?
The motivation is to rush to the border and be physically present in the U.S. while the Biden administration plays musical chairs with immigration policy. Will the Biden administration win sweeping amnesties for illegal aliens, or will it fail to deliver on its promises? Many people are betting on the former and are engaged in a desperate and dangerous run to bust through the border in an attempt to claim a chair when the music stops.
Since Jan. 20, Americans have become more apprehensive of the Biden administration’s plans to make sweeping changes to immigration. The majority of Americans are in fact becoming more restrictionist as opposed to expansionist in their views.
The Rasmussen Immigration Index for the week of Feb. 14 – 18, 2021, fell to 86.0, and it’s fallen by nearly 15 points since the week before the November election. This shows voters want tighter immigration control from President Biden’s administration. Right now, the Immigration Index is the lowest since it began in December 2019.
The administration is playing with dynamite, and has pinned itself in a corner that leaves two ways out. They can either abolish the border or enforce our immigration mandates to the fullest extent of the law. To do anything less is to invite more tragedy the likes of which we saw last week.
It is not just traffickers who profit off this immoral trade. There are a dozen industries that profit from cheap, compliant and easy to abuse labor. When I was a kid growing up in the 1960s and ‘70s, there were roughly 750 meat packing plants across the country. My mother worked the front counter of a local one called Lustig’s. The work and pay were good.
Today, 80 percent of our beef products come from three companies. The work and pay are bad. These huge factory meat processors rely on a steady stream of illegal aliens. Their business model would not work without them, and only when compelled to do so by ICE raids are they inclined to pay more, offer benefits and improve work conditions to attract a native workforce.
Neoliberal technocrats also are culpable in this and other tragedies stemming from the trafficking of illegal aliens. These are the toadies that carry the water for the oligarchs who seek to maximize profit via the unbridled movement of people and capital across international borders. They despise the concept of the nation state with its quaint and, in their minds, antiquated concepts of societal norms and democracy. They filter and shape the news and commentary to fit their deranged world views. And in this way, they are most culpable in all of this.
Kevin Lynn is the executive director of Progressives for Immigration Reform. Contact him at klynn@pfirdc.org.
The daily Southwest border updates are generating nationwide concern except in Washington, DC, where indifference reigns. The latest Department of Homeland Security report showed that in February more than 100,000 people were either apprehended by, or surrendered to, federal immigration officials on the U.S.-Mexico border. Those totals, a 14-year high, include about 9,460 unaccompanied minors and more than 19,240 family units which reflect 62 percent and 38 percent increases, respectively, when compared to January’s statistics.
Nonetheless, President Biden, his DHS Secretary Alejandro Majorkas, and his Press Secretary Jen Psaki refuse to even hint that the administration’s lax border policies need immediate reining in. For his part, Biden has not spoken officially about what his administration calls a border challenge. But Psaki refused to call the border rush a crisis, instead labeling it “an enormous challenge.” Mayorkas, when asked a similar question about whether the border events represented a crisis, answered with a flat out “no.”
But Texas Gov. Greg Abbott didn’t hesitate to call the growing border chaos a crisis. Abbott has a better perspective on the border influx than White House operatives, and the governor formed Operation Lone Star to deploy personnel from the Texas Department of Public Safety and the Texas National Guard to the border to secure the area. Abbott said Operation Lone Star’s goal is to “deny Mexican cartels and other smugglers the ability to move drugs and people into Texas.”
While the White House border rhetoric has focused almost exclusively on what it describes as the need for a humanitarian response to migration, it’s ignored the undeniable connection between open borders and human smuggling. Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) is the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs top Republican who has overseen three separate committee investigations that date back over several administrations.
Portman’s 2016 investigation, “Protecting Unaccompanied Alien Children from Trafficking and Other Abuses,” uncovered that the Department of Health and Human Services failed to adequately vet or to conduct in-depth background checks on the Ohio adults to whom it released minor children. The adults turned out to be human smugglers. The 2018 report, “Oversight of the Care of Unaccompanied Minor Children,” came to similarly shocking and dangerous conclusions. HHS and DHS didn’t make the recommended post-2016 changes to trafficking crimes and to tracking whether released aliens report for their designated immigration court dates.
Biden appears either under-informed or indifferent to the growing human trafficking trade that his administration encourages. After ending the Remain in Mexico policy, the latest federal government’s inducement for more unaccompanied children to rush the border is that HHS will pay for minors in its custody to be flown to their sponsor or family member’s home, often illegal immigrants, when, as is invariably the case, the receiving adult cannot pay. Furthermore, Biden’s DHS submitted a notice to the Federal Registerto withdraw an existing proposed rule that would require the receiving immigrant to sponsor and care for an arriving migrant once s/he becomes a lawful permanent resident.
While Biden and those close to him debate semantics, last week DHS reached its breaking point, and begged ICE deportation officers to travel to the border ASAP to help with what the agency called “security operations” for the illegal immigrant children and families that have overwhelmed a swamped Border Patrol. Michael Meade, Immigration and Customs Enforcement acting director, pleaded for “immediate action.” Volunteers would include civilians with medical or legal experience as well as drivers and food servers.
Officials on the scene won’t speculate on when the emergency request for increased border assistance might be called off. The Biden administration is in full denial, and the president refuses to travel to the border to evaluate conditions. As the surge with its associated criminal and COVID risks intensifies daily, an educated guess is that the existing calamitous circumstances will remain unchanged well into the peak summer months.
Joe Guzzardi is a Progressives for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org.
America presents: A Fractured Fairy Tale – “The Push-a-Button Generation” or “What Do The Boomers To Us To Gen Z All Have In Common.
Today we can push a button and have it all: streaming music, streaming video, climate control, food heated in seconds, literally anything imaginable delivered to our front door.
During our nation’s founding there was no button to push to heat the dwelling or cook food. Ben Franklin passed up a fortune by giving away his Franklin Stove design.
During the Civil War there was no button to push to administer pain medicines to the wounded. Men were held down, limbs sawed off to prevent infection.
During the Westward expansion there was no button to push for GPS. Families left the relative comfort of those days for uncertain journeys with nothing but Faith to guide them.
During the World Wars there were no buttons to push, no drones to fly. Combat was hand to hand and very brutal. But our Every Man beat their Super Man and delivered the world from tyranny. Peace and Prosperity were the fruits of our Greatest Generation’s struggles, sacrifices and blood shed.
But soon we had buttons. Buttons on the television, the car radio, the microwave oven. Buttons to heat our homes, to wash our clothes. Soon after we began to lose our way. Things became too easy.
We can press a button today and bring the entire globe to our fingertips yet many people have never experienced such isolation, such disconnect from their fellow humans, from their own humanity.
So we seek out more buttons and frantically push them hoping to feel something or to fill some perceived void. We push a button and gamble away a life savings rather than become entrepreneurs. We push a button and invite all kinds of depravity into our homes rather than seek out meaningful relationships. We push a button to escape into a virtual world “farming” or “building” while allowing our food supply to be genetically modified and our jobs to be outsourced.
The United States is at a cross roads in 2021. Will we continue to demand instant gratification (that inevitably led to so called cancel culture and will lead to much, much worse if left unchecked) or will we with temperance, master technology and regain our own humanity in the process.
This is our moment in history. Will you define the moment or let the moment define you. You still have a choice, for now. Choose wisely.
In recent polling, the Pew Research Center found that 71 percent of Americans believe that government officials DO NOT care about what they think. The vast majority of people that we hear from share that belief. The public points to outrageous salaries, healthcare paid for by taxpayers, and a revolving door between elected officials, lobbying jobs, and appointments to lucrative government jobs.
Pennsylvania is famous or infamous depending on your perspective regarding politicians “taking care of” friends and family at taxpayer expense. Most Boards and Authorities created by the legislature include seats to be filled by the “leadership” of the House, Senate, and the Governor. Many of those seats come with a high salary and little observable work. One example of a Board packed with former lawmakers is the PA Gaming Control Board (GCB).
Last week, we learned that Jake Corman (R-34), President pro tempore of the Senate, named Frances Regan to the GCB. Mrs. Regan is the wife of Senator Mike Regan (R-31). Between his Senate salary and her GCB salary, the Regan’s are now collecting over a quarter-million dollars per year in government salaries. When you consider that lawmakers only pay 2 percent of their annual salary for medical coverage, it paints an even worse picture. And, according to a 2019 news story, Senator Regan stayed in the lucrative legislative pension program (which is underfunded by $78 billion) instead of opting into a 401-k type plan. Finally, Mr. and Mrs. Regan will also be collecting two federal pensions on top of everything else due to their time working for the federal government. At what point is enough taxpayer money enough?
How likely is that out of 12 million Pennsylvanians, Mrs. Regan was the most qualified person in the state? It certainly looks like this is another case of politicians taking care of themselves and their friends at taxpayers’ expense.
Is it any wonder that the public believes that elected officials are only in it for themselves? With numbers like these, it’s hard to argue anything else in this case.
Among President Biden’s first day Executive Actions is one that promised to tackle climate change, a primary concern of Congress. Included as part of the Biden administration’s climate change objectives are rejoining the Paris Agreement and leading what the administration called a clean energy revolution that will, by 2035, achieve a carbon pollution-free power sector. On Earth Day 2021, Biden will host a Leaders’ Climate Summit where he’ll emphasize his ambitious agenda.
Biden’s goals are noble, but assuming they’re eventually achievable, they’re down the road. Ever-growing human populations, with their larger carbon footprint, are a big variable in climate change. But Biden is ignoring the current Southwest border crisis that will add tens of thousands of people to the nation’s 330 million residents. The Wall Street Journal reported that, through February, Customs and Border Protection will have taken 9,000unaccompanied minors into custody, an unprecedented crisis. Biden’s administration also announced that it will admit 25,000 asylum seekers held in Mexico.
Making northbound travel more appealing to prospective asylees, Biden ordered Immigration and Customs officials to lay out the red carpet. The federal government is, at taxpayer expense, flying aliens to mainland destinations where their presence, proof of the unpopular border surge with voters, will be less visible. Under Biden, the children and adult asylees will remain in the U.S. indefinitely, raise families and add to the U.S. carbon footprint as automobile, housing and durable goods consumers. When family reunification kicks in, the number of new, settled migrants will increase by a factor of more than 3, the number that Princeton University found represents the average number of immigrants from abroad that will join their stateside relatives. The average U.S. carbon footprint for each individual in the U.S. is 16 tons, among the world’s highest.
Population growth, whether created through natural increases by births outnumbering deaths or in-migration outpacing out-migration, is, the Census Bureau confirms, the leading cause of the United States’ ever-larger carbon footprint. Regulations like those the Biden administration hopes to put in place cannot negate the nation’s current immigrant intake of more than 1 million annually plus whatever unknown number of illegal aliens successfully cross the border.
During the early 1970s, President Richard Nixon signed several laws aimed at reducing each American’s per capita effect on the environment. Five decades ago, when Nixon was president, the U.S. population was 203 million; today immigration-fueled growth has pushed the nation’s population to 330 million. According to the Census Bureau, the U.S. receives one net international migrant every 666 seconds. The Census Bureau also predicts that by mid-decade, immigration will be the largest contributor to a U.S. population that exceeds 400 million, and will inevitably create a larger carbon footprint.
Whatever legislative changes the Biden administration may rule on in the guise of clean energy and reducing climate change impacts, their positive impacts will be reduced or completely negated by the increased emissions from millions of new people. Research in 2020 from The Journal of Population and Sustainability evaluated 44 countries, including the U.S., and found that emissions arising from population growth between 1990 and 2019 wiped out two-thirds of the emission reductions that arose from greater energy efficiency programs.
Blame Congress, not immigrants. Newly arrived migrants require more urban development – housing, schools, health care, governmental services, streets, parking, waste removal and places to work, shop and worship. The result is more urban sprawl, and its irreversible habitat loss.
In 1996, President Clinton, as part of his “Population and Consumption Task Force Report, President’s Council on Sustainable Development,” urged that immigration be discussed “with sensitivity and care” on behalf of “the American future.” Republicans and Democrats alike have ignored Clinton’s sound advice for 25 years. Their shameful cowardice – they know if they spoke the truth about immigration and population, the public wouldn’t support their agenda – ensured that runaway growth would escalate during those two and a half decades.
Joe Guzzardi has written about immigration, population and the environment for more than 30 years. More @OurCarbonFootprint on FB. Contact Joe at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org.
Big Business Endorses Amnesty And So Do The Universities
By Joe Guzzardi
Once again, the big guys, those with money, power and influence, are ganging up on the little guys, Americans struggling in the neverending pandemic shutdown to earn a sustenance-level income.
As is too frequently the case, immigration, and specifically President Biden’s U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021, is the focal point of the ongoing lopsided battle of the elite versus the working classes. At the February 19 New England Business Immigration Summit (NEBIS), Harvard’s president, Lawrence S. Bacow, along with biotech executives and other higher education leaders gathered virtually to urge Congress to pass the amnesty legislation that Biden promised as a candidate.
The group urged Congress to grant citizenship to illegal aliens as well as to deferred action for childhood arrivals and temporary protected status recipients. Conference participants also want the federal government to issue more employment-based visas to overseas workers which President Trump paused because of COVID-19 concerns (still valid), and to restore refugee levels to the pre-Trump totals of 100,000 or more annually.
David Greene, Maine’s Colby College president, said that only an immediate immigrant infusion can save New England. Greene’s statement is an insult to unemployed and underemployed New Englanders. For his part, Bacow wants more opportunities for international students to remain in the U.S. for employment, a consequence that, if realized, would come at the expense of U.S. college graduates.
Whenever big names like NEBIS smooth-talkers get together openly to advocate for more legally present immigrants, an age-old ploy that dates back at least to the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, their objective is to convey to and sway the public that when so many prominent, successful people agree on a single government policy, in this case amnesty, they must be right. After all, an elitist “summit” has rendered its pro-amnesty verdict – case closed!
In truth, immigration expansionist advocates are misguided, and if their encouragement to Congress succeeds, millions of new, lifetime-authorized workers will join the pandemic-crippled, automation-driven economy. To begin with, no one knows the size of the illegal immigrant population that Biden has vowed to reward with amnesty. Former Department of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen admitted on national television that DHS is clueless about whether there are 11 million or 30 million illegal aliens in the U.S. If Nielsen doesn’t know, then nobody does. Even the lowest estimate, 11 million, plus DACAs, TPS and more employment visas would mean that the labor market will be flooded with a minimum of 12 million legal workers who will provide the cheap labor that employers covet.
At NEBIS, David Barber whose family founded Barber Foods, a Maine-based food company, insisted that Maine “doesn’t have enough people to fill their jobs.” In a 2017, $4.2 billion transaction, Tyson Foods acquired Barber Foods’ parent company. Barber’s claim about not enough Mainers to fill jobs is false.
A few years ago, during a similar worker shortage allegation, the Bangor Daily News published a story titled “Amid Foreign Worker Shortage, Bar Harbor Businesses Turn to Local Workers.” Readers reacted with vehemence. They concluded that “after crying for years” about how Maine businesses will fail without the foreign workers used for years to hold down wages, employers now admit that they’ll need to hire locals. Employers should offer higher wages to their neighbors – the traditional solution to filling jobs – before hiring from abroad.
Universities are, like private-sector employers, money-driven. International students who attend public universities pay out-of-state tuition fees that greatly exceed instate tuition. The nearly 1 million foreign-born students, 52 percent Indian and Chinese, enrolled in public colleges contribute to the financial well-being of those institutions. On average, annual out-of-state tuition costs $15,000 more, a gap that grows wider every year.
Historically, an international student who entered the U.S. on an F-1 student visa would return home after graduation. Today, however, the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program allows science, technology, engineering and math students to gain employment in well-paid, white-collar jobs for periods up to three years following graduation. DHS estimates that more than 200,000 F-1 visa holders, about 20 percent of the international student enrollment, are working with OPT authorization. Biden’s amnesty proposes automatically granting a Green Card to every STEM graduate.
Follow the money trail, the old saw, applies to immigration advocacy. Proponents want cheap labor and higher profits, even if those goals hurt Americans. Biden’s amnesty, examined closely, offers nothing to improve Americans’ lives, but is from its first page to the 353rd deliberately calculated to harm.
Joe Guzzardi is a Progressives for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org.
Big Business Endorses Amnesty And So Do The Universities
Big Business Endorses Amnesty And So Do The Universities
Transformative Immigration Bill Hits Congress And It’s Bad
By Joe Guzzardi
Now that analysts have had enough time to wade through the 353 pages that makes up the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021 (USCA), the small print comes into focus. The USCA’s broad strokes have been widely publicized: the legislation proposes to grant amnesty to an estimated 14.5 million or more unlawfully present foreign nationals, increase annual legal immigration totals, issue more employment-based visas, and otherwise completely overhaul established immigration law.
Millions of new work permits would be granted. The 353 pages don’t contain a single provision that helps American citizens or recently arrived lawfully present residents who are struggling during the coronavirus pandemic to establish themselves. Also harmed and insulted are immigrants who waited years and paid significant fees to come to the U.S. through proper channels. U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) and U.S. Representative Linda Sanchez, (D-Calif.) introduced the bill, and its cosponsors are long-time immigration expansionists.
From his first day as president, Biden urged Congress to draft and pass USCA. Menendez called the legislation “a moral and economic imperative.” And Sanchez said that the bill “is our moment to finally deliver big, bold, and inclusive immigration reform that our nation and its people deserve.” But the details prove otherwise.
For example, the bill allows every illegal alien that the Trump administration deported to return, and apply for amnesty. Under Biden’s concept, aliens who have gone through either expedited removal or been ordered deported by a Department of Justice immigration judge – a lengthy and thorough process – will be welcomed back to the U.S. and put on a path to citizenship. The Federation for American Immigration Reform estimates that because of amnesty and other relaxed laws, 52 million more legal and illegal immigrants will eventually join the general population.
Another large chunk of the bill will retrain Customs and Border Protection agents about where and when they can enforce immigration laws. Although USCA doesn’t include the specific language, Capitol Hill insiders have learned that the Biden administration plans to, within 90 days, dismantle Immigration and Customs Enforcement by abolishing deportation officers’ jobs and removing only hardened criminals.
While USCA is winding its way through Congress, some Biden officials have promoted the idea of flying to the U.S., at taxpayer expense, Central American asylum seekers currently detained in Mexico as part of President Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” program. A United Nation’s official relayed to the Reuters news agency the federal government’s interest in transporting the asylum-seekers by air into the U.S. where they’ll be given a date to appear before an immigration judge. Immediately after the U.N. created a website that allowed asylum seekers to register remotely for processing at the U.S.-Mexico border, hundreds of migrants signed up.
Biden’s radical immigration agenda is best reflected in his administration’s directionto the Department of Homeland Security to stop using the words “alien” and “illegal alien” in public communications or in intra-agency exchanges. The word “alien” is part of U.S. code, and is historically used to define “any person not a citizen ornational of the United States.”
In a memo from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to DHS, however, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services acting director Tracy Renaud wrote that the language changes must include using “noncitizen” instead of “alien,” and “undocumented noncitizen” or “undocumented individual” instead of “illegal alien.” Assimilation, most new immigrants’ decades-old goal, has also been deemed offensive, and must be replaced by “integration or civic integration.” The administration’s new rhetoric is, said officials, “more inclusive.”
The proposed immigration overhaul is so extreme that Democrats on the front lines – Texas and other border states – are alarmed about possibly losing control of the House of Representatives in 2022. Calling Biden’s plan a “catastrophe,” and a “recipe for disaster,” U.S. Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D-Texas) cautioned him against “going off the rails,” the course he perceives that Biden is traveling.
Other Texas House members echoed Gonzalez’s fears. Border municipalities are in an uproar too. The mayor of Del Rio, Texas, has asked Biden to stop releasing untested illegal immigrants into his community. Mayor Bruno Lozano said the city doesn’t have the resources to help illegals, and he fears health risks to his citizens.
As currently written, USCA provides lots more immigration and lots less enforcement, and it has little public support. But the legislation could be parceled into smaller, standalone bills or snuck into major must-pass legislation. Either way, the Biden administration could remake 21st century immigration, and in the process permanently destroy millions of working Americans’ livelihoods and their children’s futures.
Joe Guzzardi is a Progressives for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org.
Transformative Immigration Bill Hits Congress And It’s Bad
Transformative Immigration Bill Hits Congress And It’s Bad
Presidential honeymoons have remarkably different lengths. President Barack Obama’s honeymoon, at least with the press, began the day he announced his candidacy, February 10, 2007, and the blissful union continues today. On the complete opposite end of the honeymoon spectrum is President Donald Trump, an impeachment target from before his inauguration in 2017 until February 2021, a month after he left office.
Surprisingly, the polls show that President Joe Biden is, after only four weeks in the White House, having a rough go of it with the very Democrats that helped elect him. The Morning Consult poll, a partnership with the left-leaning journalism company Politico, found that several of Biden’s Executive Orders, especially those immigration-related, are among the most unpopular with voters.
Of the voters polled, only 45 percent support including illegal immigrants in the census, and only 46 percent approve halting the Trump administration’s Remain in Mexico policy which the Biden administration has undone. Effective February 19, the first of an eventual 25,000 migrants will begin entry into the United States. Others entered earlier and illegally were, despite the COVID-19 pandemic, caught and released with orders to appear in immigration court at a later date.
Biden’s lenient immigration policies have encouraged large migrant caravans to come north. As one of thousands of border-bound Hondurans told CNN, Biden is “going to help all of us” to become legal residents. When askedhow the administration could refute the widely held perception that the 100 percent surge increases meant that migrants interpreted that the borders were open, an opinion Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador shares, White House press secretary Jen Psaki avoided giving a straightforward answer.
The least popular among Biden’s Executive Orders is his goal to expand refugee admission to 125,000 from President Trump’s 15,000, a greater than 800 percent increase. Among those polled, 48 percent of voters somewhat or strongly oppose the president’s plan to increase refugee resettlement in the upcoming fiscal year, while 39 percent support it.
Summing up the February 5-7 survey among 1,986 registered voters, and accounting for a 2 percent error margin, Morning Consult’s Senior Editor Cameron Easley wrote that “Orders pertaining to immigration and immigrant rights constitute five of his seven least popular actions among voters, and are particularly animating for Republicans.” As a result, Easley concluded, “immigration will be tricky political territory for the president.”
The nationwide apprehension about Biden’s expansive immigration executive orders is easily understandable. At the border, COVID-untested migrants, their total as yet unknown, have been released into Texas, a development that State Sen. Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa (D-McAllen) called “very alarming.”
From Texas, many migrants enter other states’ general populations, and could put those residents at risk. An anonymous Customs and Border Protection official told local reporters that as per a longstanding practice, when long-term holding solutions become impossible, “some migrants will be processed for removal, provided a Notice to Appear, and released into the U.S. to await a future immigration hearing.” Without identifying catch and release, the anonymous CBP officer identified the process to a tee.
Biden’s proposed refugee intake increase has generated similar concernsabout Americans’ health and safety. Weaker screening and less vetting of international refugees could unnecessarily add to the domestic COVID crisis.
Americans are puzzled at what the thought process may be behind Biden’s Day One urgency to liberalize immigration laws when there’s no link to how his actions help the millions of economically distressed, employment-anxious citizens and lawfully present residents. Biden’s immigration actions will expand the labor pool – the Bureau of Labor Statistics employment-population ratio that measures the number of people employed against the total working-age population is a dismal 57.5 percent.
Biden is urging Congress to pass amnesty that would legalize and provide lifelong valid work permission to millions of aliens, a big gamble for the new president. With only a five-seat margin in the House of Representatives, the Senate tied at 50-50, and with history showing that the mid-term elections cost the majority party about 25 seats, Biden could be, as the Morning Consult poll editor warned, plunging into cold and murky water.
Joe Guzzardi is a Progressives for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org.
