Identity Theft Occurs Every 2 Seconds

Identity Theft Occurs Every 2 Seconds

By Joe Guzzardi

In its 2018 analysis, the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) uncovered potentially 39 million identity theft cases between 2012 to 2016 that involved unlawfully present foreign nationals who stole the identities of American citizens. Illegal aliens frequently use stolen or falsified Social Security numbers to apply for, and often get, U.S. jobs. An estimated 8 million unlawfully present aliens work in the U.S. economy. Some among them vote illegally in state and federal elections.

Identity Theft Occurs Every 2 Seconds

After culling through more than 1 million tax returns from last year, auditors uncovered roughly 883,000 cases of employment identity theft. According to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) the Internal Revenue Service failed to notify 393,000 victims that included more than 133,000 minors whose parents are therefore then unable to protect against the continued use of their children’s Social Security numbers.

The Washington Times wrote that the IRS, citing privacy issues, steadfastly refuses to advise parents about their children’s data theft, a misguided policy that can lead to ruining, in the future, the children’s credit rating and their employment prospects. The IRS has another questionable practice: the agency only advises of repeat employment identity theft every three years, giving fraudsters carte blanche to continue to use their criminally obtained data.

After their identities have been stolen, victims often spend years and considerable sums trying to restore their good credit ratings. In one egregious case, for 20 years an illegal immigrant drug trafficker and sex offender used a Texas man’s identitywhich made it impossible for the victim to find employment.

Stealing Social Security numbers is a felony crime, and knowingly submitting a falsified I-9 form is also a felony. On every I-9 form that applicants fill out, the following grave warning appears: “I am aware that federal law provides for imprisonment and/or fines for false statements or use of false documents in connection with the completion of this form.”

Given the alarming identity theft statistics, a crime which occurs every two seconds and that TIGTA once labeled an “epidemic,” the federal government should be in hot pursuit of the perpetrators. Instead, the feds have shown little interest in prosecuting offenders.

Illegal immigration is often referred to as a victimless crime. But U.S. Attorney Mike Hurst took exception to the old canard. After an August 2019 Immigration and Customs Enforcement action at a Mississippi workplace that resulted in the detention of 680 unlawfully present aliens, and the prosecution of 119 for using false documents to gain their employment, Hurst issued a statement that defended ICE.

Said Hurst: Americans have been “directly harmed by the theft of their identities, resulting in citizens not being able to get loans or credit cards, obtain health insurance, and perform other basic activities.”

Identity theft could be stopped in its tracks if Congress could muster up its long-absent political will to take three steps:

a)      Mandate E-Verify, the free, online program that would immediately confirm whether a new hire is legally authorized to work in the U.S. E-Verify is available to employers nationwide, but since it’s voluntary, employers who prefer to hire cheap labor can hire illegal immigrants with impunity.

b)      Resume no-match letters, the practice that the Social Security Administration adopted in 2002 when it sent out nearly 1 million letters to employers that filed W-2s with information that was inconsistent with the agency’s records. SSA’s original intention was to correct clerical mistakes that had created large sums paid into the system going uncredited. Quickly, however, SSA discovered that the major problem was illegal immigrants who lied to their employers. Thousands of illegal aliens either left their jobs to avoid confrontation or were fired when they were found out. But the no-match letter campaign had various softened iterations before it ended entirely in 2012 when the Chamber of Commerce and immigration activist groups protested.

c)       Notify identity theft victims. SSA also should send letters to workers with more than one employer reporting wages to their SSNs. By sending letters to employees showing more than one employer, SSA would put the employees on notice that, unless they are actually working more than one job, they are identity theft victims, and should take immediate action to minimize the damage to their financial and work histories.

Congress’ unwillingness to intervene on behalf of U.S. citizens, and in the process protect illegal immigrant identity thieves, is consistent with its overall indifference to protecting Americans while incentivizing illegal immigration.

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.

Identity Theft Occurs Every 2 Seconds

Biden Amnesty Gamble Risks America

Biden Amnesty Gamble Risks America

By Joe Guzzardi 

Immigration, the nation’s most contentious domestic issue, finally got airtime in the final debate between President Trump and challenger Joe Biden. The former Vice President went way out on a limb when he promised immediate amnesty to roughly 11 million unlawfully present foreign nationals.

Biden stuck his neck out further when he said that Americans “owe” citizenship to illegal immigrants: “We owe them, we owe them…” Biden’s verb choice will disappoint the moderate and undecided voters he needs in his White House quest who view amnesty as a reward for knowingly breaking U.S. laws.

Biden Amnesty Gamble Risks America


Amnesty is the federal government’s pardon for violating immigration policies – using false documentation or committing identity theft to secure Social Security numbers or other official identification cards, obtaining driver’s licenses to gain employment and to stay in the county. The greatest perk amnesty ultimately offers is a path to lawful permanent residency and U.S. citizenship.

Since the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, there have been seven individual amnesties for Central AmericansHaitians, Cubans and Eastern Europeans. Additional amnesties are proposed in Congress every year – a far cry from what then-President Ronald Reagan promised would be a “one-time only” amnesty. Until the 1986 legislation which granted legal status to 2.8 million unlawfully present foreign nationals, amnesty had been provided exclusively on a case-by-case basis.

On its face alone, amnesty is immensely unpopular among mainstream Americans. Biden’s promise to send Congress amnesty legislation within the first 100 days of his administration would merely be the starting point for the inevitable labor market saturation and wage suppression that the presence of millions of newly work-authorized foreign nationals will represent. Remember – amnesty translates into work permission. Biden is promising U.S. workers, the unemployed, underemployed, jobless minorities and recent university graduates that he will advocate for more labor competition in an economy devastated by COVID-19.

A deeper dig into Biden’s amnesty proposal uncovers more troubling probabilities. Many more than 11 million illegal immigrants may be present. Eleven million has been the estimated illegal immigrant population for year; the likelihood is that the total is higher. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Yale University research projected an illegal immigrant presence that ranges from 16.5 million to 29.1 million illegal immigrants.

The scholars emphasized that their findings didn’t reflect rising illegal immigration, but rather years of undercounting the alien population. Analysts who study immigration consider the establishment media’s reporting that the illegal immigration count remains unchanged for decades at 11 million a near demographic impossibility given the many border surges, catch and release, and asylum entries. They expect many more to come forward to claim amnesty eligibility. And Biden, like his amnesty-advocating predecessors, never mentioned the long-term population consequences that the inevitable chain migration creates. Excluding the effect that Biden’s amnesty would have, the U.S.’s current legal immigration system that admits 1.5 million foreign nationals annually will create over the next two decades an inflow of between seven and eight million chain migrants.

During his first 100 days, the former vice president also promised to place a moratorium on removals, and to deport only aliens with felony convictions. But since Biden has pledged to restrict Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s interior actions, it is doubtful that the vague background checks that he’s proposed even if carried out would lead to aliens’ removals.

Biden offered Americans zero in exchange for his coveted amnesty. Had he proposed amnesty in exchange for implementing mandatory E-Verify, ending birthright citizenship or limiting chain migration to nuclear family members, Biden might have won over some undecided voters. But as Biden outlined his plan, he offered no benefit to the average voter, but gifted a huge bonanza to the Chamber of Commerce and craven, cheap labor-addicted employer profiteers who will benefit from endless employment-based visa issuance.

Voters should heed President Reagan’s Attorney General Ed Meese’s 1986 amnesty assessment. Meese said that IRCA didn’t solve the illegal immigration problem. The legislation was plagued by “extensive document fraud, and the number of people applying for amnesty far exceeded projections… and after a brief slowdown, illegal immigration returned to high levels and continued unabated, forming the nucleus of today’s large population of illegal aliens.”

Biden’s amnesty gamble in the midst of a tight employment pandemic that has put millions on the unemployment line may backfire. The all-in on immigration platform may cost Biden.


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.

Biden Amnesty Gamble Bad For America

One Billion Americans Is Crackpot Fantasy

One Billion Americans Is Crackpot Fantasy

By Joe Guzzardi 

 Glenn Beck, the well-known former Fox Network anchor, a self-professed conservative, and Blaze TV network owner, teamed up with ultra-liberal Matt Yglesias, the left-wing Vox editor to advocate for a U.S. population of 1 billion.

After an interview with Yglesias, who authored “One Billion Americans: the Case for Thinking Bigger,” Beck tweeted that a 1 billion population, triple of today’s 330 million, is a “noble goal” and “crucial” to keep China from overtaking America as the leading global power. Yglesias and Beck agree that the best way to add approximately 670 million new residents is through immigration.

One Billion Americans Is Crackpot Fantasy


The Beck/Yglesias concept is so mind-bogglingly outlandish that it barely merits a response. But since Beck and Yglesias represent Trojan Horses for globalist immigration expansionists, a counter is required. Delivered via Beck and Yglesias, expansionists’ sub rosa message to immigration restrictionists is that more people benefits America. Accordingly, Beck urges restrictionists to put jingoism aside, and instead welcome one and all.

But neither globalist puts forward an intelligent, tangible argument for how more people would actually play out on a practical, day-to-day level. No explanation was offered how the migrants would be selected, how they would arrive and at what pace would they come. Then, after the migrants reach America, how would they actually survive?

For his part, Beck repeated the tedious, insulting bon mot that immigrants work harder than “most Americans.” That is Beck’s opinion, factually unsubstantiated, and a direct slap in the fact to about 30 million unemployed Americans. But for the sake of meaningful discussion, Beck should explain where exactly the arriving immigrants would work.

COVID-19 has eliminated thousands of jobs, many of which will never return. Even the pre-COVID unemployment forecast was grim. In 2013, the Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology found that at least half of all American jobs are vulnerable to computerization, a trend that’s well-underway in production labor and service industries. The jobs lost plus immigrants added equation means more cheap labor for the industries that may survive computerization, and severely depressed wages for Americans.

Assuming the immigrant labor issue could be resolved – a huge if – then follows the practical questions of where the new migrants would live, how they would transport themselves, how quickly new infrastructure could be built to accommodate them, and what post-migration America would look like. Despite the pandemic, building permits, housing starts and housing completions are moving briskly along. The nation’s highways are gridlocked nightmares, and the 1 billion Americans would live in a country unrecognizable from the one we inhabit today.

In her article, “The Flaw in the Statue of Liberty,” Karen Shragg laid out the compelling case to limit immigration to sensible, sustainable levels. Shragg wrote that more people make numerous negative environmental impacts regardless of their nationality. Since all people are consumers, Shragg said, their collective goal should be to consume less. But that’s unlikely as we all need water, energy, food, jobs and open land – all of which are in limited supply.

With an average multiplier of 3.1 persons per petitioner, chain migration would eventually grow the 670,000 new migrants into more than 2 million. TheNew York Times provided an excellent example of how chain migration functions as a population atomic bomb. In “One Face of Immigration in America is a Family Tree Rooted in Asia,” the Times reported that a young Indian engineer arrived in America at age 23, and settled in Nevada. Between the 1970s and the mid-1980s, he brought his wife, mother, five sisters and a brother to the U.S. from his native India. Eventually, his siblings sponsored their family members. Over three decades, more than 90 immigrants arrived in the U.S. who can link their presence back to one immigrant.

America needs thoughtful immigration laws that serve its citizens’ best interests, something that neither Beck nor Yglesias wants to promote. Immigration has already dramatically increased U.S. population. Between 1776 and 1965, immigration to the U.S. averaged 250,000 annually. But major legislative changes in 1950s, 1960s and 1990, sent immigration totals skyrocketing.

The Beck/Yglesias fantasy will never become reality. But more rational sounding yet dangerous proposals are routinely introduced in Congress. The latest is the 2,154 page Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions Act, the so-called HEROES Act, which offers amnesty, work permits and fast-track Green Cards to temporary visa holders and to illegal aliens. Knowing that few in Congress would read the lengthy bill, the HEROES sponsor, Nita Lowey (D-NY), made sure to bury the amnesty and work permit provisions on page 2,030. Obscure government is always immigration advocates’ stealth strategy.


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.

One Billion Americans Is Crackpot Fantasy

TPS Not Temporary Protection

TPS Not Temporary Protection

By Joe Guzzardi

Since the Immigration Act of 1990 created Temporary Protected Status, the program has become vampire-like in its inability to be killed off. Like most immigration laws, the original intentions behind it appear compassionate. But also like most immigration laws, abuses become common. Yet, 30 years later, the status quo grinds on.

TPS Not Temporary Protection

TPS is a protected status, the “P” and the “S,” granted to certain foreign nationals whose home countries are embroiled in war or ravaged by natural disasters which makes returning home perilous.

So far, so good.

But the “T” for temporary is a mirage, and usually means permanent. Overwhelmingly, TPS recipients never return home. Nationals from ten countries, a total of about 320,000 people, are enjoying the benefits of lawful permanent residency, most notably, employment authorization documents. The ten countries are Haiti, El Salvador, Syria, Nepal, Honduras, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Nicaragua and South Sudan.

TPS has a relative – Deferred Enforced Departure – that’s awarded to individuals that TPS previously covered, but which subsequently expired. Liberia is a prime DED example that expanded into a potential avenue to permanent lawful residency, a provision that’s included in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2020 and known as the Liberian Refugee Immigration Fairness Act.

LRIFA is an amnesty that has nothing to do with national defense, but which, at Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed’s urging, was nevertheless snuck into the most recent NDAA. Against the wishes of many of his supporters, President Trump signed NDAA, and thereby granted amnesty to about 4,000 Liberians.

President Trump’s TPS record is a mixed bag – a kind of close but no cigar. El Salvador, for example, was TPS-designated in 2001 after a major earthquakerocked the nation. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has granted El Salvador several extensions. Nearly two decades after El Salvador received TPS, the country has become a favorite tourist destination. In 2018, El Salvador welcomed close to 1.68 million tourists, up from 1.56 million the previous year.

Since returning to El Salvador today is generally risk-free, in 2018 President Trump announced a proposed TPS phase out. But a California judge, ruling on a lawsuit that the American Civil Liberties Union filed, blocked the Trump administrationwhich then, in February 2019, extended TPS for El Salvador and other nations until January 2020. In October 2019, President Trump extended employment authorization for Salvadoran TPS holders until January 4, 2021, and also lengthened TPS for 365 days from the date that the multiple TPS-related lawsuits have been concluded.

The TPS merry-go-round follies involving President Trump’s attempts to repatriate foreign nationals, but the courts blocking his efforts, have played out similarly to El Salvador’s example with cases involving Sudan, Nicaragua, Honduras and Haiti.

The Trump administration has amassed a dismal TPS failure record with the courts that matches his overall high failure rate on other immigration-related issues. Given the Trump administration’s poor history with the judicial system, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals 2-1 decision that the president could end TPS for El Salvador, Nicaragua and Sudan surprised analysts. A New York judge’s ruling that Haitians cannot be deported remains in place.

The appeals court majority opinion read, in part, that “The decision to designate any foreign country for TPS begins and ends with the [Department of Homeland Security] Secretary, so long as certain limited statutory criteria are met.” A Justice Department representative hailed the decision, and noted that the 2018 injunction “prevented the Department of Homeland Security from taking action that Congress has vested solely within the discretion of the Secretary of Homeland Security – action that is statutorily precluded from judicial review.

For federal immigration law to retain at least a shred of credibility, the most basic conditions must be met. If a program that grants affirmative benefits to its participants is labeled “temporary,” then it must be short-term. But some TPS recipients have lived in the U.S. for two decades, a laughable outcome for a “temporary” program.

TPS requires that nationals return home once in-country conditions warrant it. President Trump’s efforts to end TPS have been described as harsh and uncaring. Critics fail to note the benefits to the struggling home countries once their nationals return from the U.S. where many learned English, acquired skills and developed a strong work ethic. Those talents are in short supply in TPS-granted nations, and the returnees can help boost their home nations to greater economic success.


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.

TPS Not Temporary Protection

Complex Scheme Undermines Immigration Reform

Complex Scheme Undermines Immigration Reform

By Joe Guzzardi

Once again, the Deep State has set out to undermine President Trump. And in the process, career bureaucrats and entrenched Capitol Hill never-Trumpers are attempting to put the skids to U.S. tech workers. The issue, as per usual, is well-paying, white-collar jobs that Department of Homeland Security and Department of State want to give away to foreign nationals.

Complex Scheme Undermines Immigration Reform

As first reported by Breitbart’s Neil Munro, DHS and State have concocted a complex scheme that would, unless President Trump intervenes to scotch the plan, result in 400,000 work permits being issued to foreign nationals, almost exclusively Indians and Chinese. Jumping for joy along with the prospective employment authorization recipients are bottom-feeding immigration lawyers who will profit obscenely from paperwork pushing, cheap labor-addicted corporations and immigration expansionists for whom too much is never enough.

The toxic brew that Capitol Hill subversives have cooked up is a blend of DHS and State Department fancy footwork that will displace qualified, experienced U.S. tech workers and block recent U.S. college graduates from getting jobs at prestigious corporations. Munro estimates that each year about 800,000 college graduates with degrees in skilled occupations in health care, engineering, business, math, science, software or architecture are poised to enter the labor market.

The State Department will dole out the first batch of Green Cards to 120,000 foreign nationals. Those individuals will receive the unused family reunification visas that the COVID-19 virus put on hold. Remember that President Trump’s intention was to slow immigration during the pandemic. State’s action flies in President Trump’s face.

At the same time, DHS officials have started the process through an early filing for adjustment of immigration status to give backlogged Indian and Chinese nationals up to 300,000 employment authorization documents. The nationals would receive a so-called Green Card Lite that will nevertheless eventually lead to permanent residency and citizenship.

A Green Card Lite provides legal status to an uncapped number of foreign nationals and their families. The Indian worker population in the U.S. is about 1 million, a total that has certainly sent a nearly equal number of U.S. tech workers to the unemployment line. Because their fates are tied to their employers’ approval, H-1B employees are indentured servants or, as the Immigration Reform Law Institute’s John Miano refers to them, “bonded” servants.

Moreover, once those workers become lawful permanent residents (LPR), they can petition spouses and children to join them. Princeton University researchers found that an average of 3.5 persons per each new LPR are petitioned. Using the 3.5 multiplier, today’s 1 million Indian workers will eventually swell the U.S. population by 3.5 million as the petitioners’ families come to America.

For more than 30 years under both Republican and Democratic administrations, protecting U.S. tech workers’ jobs has been a straight uphill climb. When President Trump signed his “Buy American, Hire American” Executive Order, U.S. workers’ hopes rose cautiously. But after a 30-year history of setbacks at corporate giants like Disney, Caterpillar, Facebook and Amazon, caution was the appropriate sentiment as DHS and State have demonstrated in their most recent stealth assault on American workers.

Since the egregious, decades-old U.S. tech workers’ undermining could once be charted through federal databases, in 2014 the government changed its policy, and authorized the destruction of H-1B records after five years have elapsed. In a notice the Labor Department posted, it wrote that paper or electronic Labor Condition Application records “are temporary records and subject to destruction.”

The new policy came under harsh attack from then-responsible reporters, researchers and academics. Lindsay Lowell, Georgetown policy studies director at the Institute for the Study of International Migration, said that throwing away government data is “willful stupidity,” and “an anathema to the pursuit of knowledge….” Other critics called erasing key information related to American job displacement a clumsy coverup that attempts to whitewash Congress’ willingness to sell out U.S. workers.

President Trump can – much as he did when he successfully intervened after the Tennessee Valley Authority attempted to displace its skilled IT workers – bring the Deep State’s treacherous plot to a screeching halt. But for the president, distractions abound. There’s the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett and the November 3 general election, looming about a month away.

For President Trump, the risks of inaction could cost him vitally needed votes of young professionals, plus the votes of millions who supported his pro-America 2016 campaign.


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.

Complex Scheme Undermines Immigration Reform

More Americans Mean Less Wilderness

More Americans Mean Less Wilderness

By Joe Guzzardi 

For decades, federal immigration laws have been a hot-button issue. Nearly 55 years ago, on October 3, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Although few could have imagined it at the time, the ensuing decades would be rife with contentious debates about immigration and its impact on U.S. society. Both expansionists and those who favor less immigration make compelling arguments.

But, because the agenda-less U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey provides irrefutable data, few dispute immigration’s effect on population growth. Expansionists prefer not to talk about the link between immigration and population growth, but they dare not challenge it. In February, the Census Bureau projected that within the next four decades, about 75 million more people will live in the U.S., a total population of more than 400 million, up from the nation’s current 330 million. The Bureau attributes more than 85 percent of the 75 million increase to immigration, and births to immigrants.

More Americans Mean Less Wilderness

Yet expansionists keep proposing illogical arguments for more people. In California, the Victorville Daily Press published an op-ed written by Mario Lopez that advocated for more immigration. Keep in mind that California is besieged with affordable housing shortages, a growing homeless count, raging wildfires, water shortages, and the nation’s worst income inequality rate. In Victorville specifically, 23 percent of the city’s 122,400 predominantly Hispanic residents live in poverty, and only 55 percent are in the civilian labor force. Lopez should explain how a larger immigrant population will help his neighbors find jobs that will enable them to climb out of poverty.

Pro-growth arguments more ill-conceived than Lopez’s have recently appeared in mainstream publications. Jennifer Wright, political editor at-large for Harper’s Bazaar, inferred that the U.S. could have a more generous immigration policy because the globe’s 7.8 billion people could fit into Texas. The U.S. has plenty of room, Wright foolishly contends. Wright’s preposterous theory might be true technically, assuming that people are willing to live on top of each other, but because of insufficient water, food and inadequate sanitation, among other items, most would be dead within a short period. Ditto for plants and animals.

Environmentalists, however, hammer home the reality – the U.S. cannot have high immigration levels and, at the same time, protect its national resources or its residents’ quality of life. Author Dave Foreman, founder of Rewilding Earth, expressed the risks of high immigration to the U.S. and its environment in his concise formula:
 More Immigration = More Americans = Less Wilderness. 
Foreman’s message is somber, but important. Unequivocally, Foreman blames humans and their “breathtaking population boom” for the what he calls the unprecedented mass extinction of plants and animals. As one of hundreds of examples, consider North Carolina Natural Heritage Program’s Wesley Knapp, one of 16 expert botanists whose findings the international journal, “Conservation Biology,” published.

Knapp’s team found that most of the 65 documented plant extinctions occurred in the western U.S., a region that botanists rarely explore and which has been relentlessly developed over the last three decades. Because many extinctions likely occurred before scientists explored the area, it is extremely likely the 65 documented extinctions vastly underestimate the actual numbers of plant species that have been lost.

More Americans Mean Less Wilderness

Achieving sustainability becomes more elusive daily, and the U.S. is running out of time. A study from the Center for American Progress titled “How Much Nature Should America Keep?” found that “The U.S. has lost the equivalent of nine Grand Canyon national parks, or 24 million acres (9,712,455.41 hectares) of natural area, between 2001 and 2017 due to agriculture, energy development, housing sprawl and other human factors….”

Sensible immigration totals must be all Americans’ goal, not a cause for political divide. Policies that limit immigration to sustainable levels aren’t anti-immigrant; existing lawfully present immigrants would be a primary beneficiary of less immigration.

Years ago physicist and sustainability champion Al Bartlett posed a question that today’s expansionists should answer:
 “Can you think of any problem in any area of human endeavor on any scale, from
microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way aided,
assisted, or advanced by further increases in population, locally, nationally, or globally?” 
Expansionists and proponents of reduced immigration should be willing to enter into a respectful dialogue that seeks the answer to Bartlett’s important query.


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.

More Americans Mean Less Wilderness

Juan Williams Black Jobs Don’t Matter

Juan Williams Black Jobs Don’t Matter

By Joe Guzzardi


With less than two months until Election Day 2020, more and more news stories are focused on the pivotal African-American vote. In a New York Timesop-ed written by Fox News contributor Juan Williams, the author boldly wrote that “the black vote now defines American politics.” Williams’ commentary went on to provide a long list of reasons that Black Americans should support challenger Joe Biden over incumbent President Donald Trump.

Juan Williams Black Jobs Don’t Matter


Boiled down, Williams contends that African-Americans dislike President Trump because they perceive him as a racist. He believes that four more years of President Trump would be bad for Black and Latino Americans. As Williams wrote, “Black Americans have had enough,” and for them defeating Trump is “personal.” Fox News viewers know that Williams can barely contain his disdain for President Trump.

On one count, Williams is spot on. Come November the Black vote, which is 12 percent of the national electorate, could determine whether President Trump remains in the White House or whether Biden achieves his five-decade long dream of ascending to the U.S. presidency. President Trump hopes to capture more than the 8 percent of the Black vote he received in 2016. The President’s 2020 reelection campaign created Black Voices for Trump, a program designed to increase African-American voter turnout and help him garner 15 to 20 percent of the Black bloc. Expect to hear President Trump tout his pre-COVID-19 success that helped drive Black unemployment to a record low 5.5 percent last year.

Had Williams in his 2,100-word column added fact to his opinion, he could have concluded that a Biden presidency would be disastrous for African-Americans and other minorities. Biden proposes through expanded immigration to increase the work-authorized population by more than 15 million people. In short, Biden, on his website, wants to grant amnesty to roughly 11 million unlawfully present aliens, to provide an easier entry path for asylees and refugees, to protect from deportation deferred action for childhood arrivals and their families, to maintain the diversity lottery, to expand employment-based visa categories for both low- and high-skilled workers, to dilute border and interior enforcement, and to defend temporary protected status recipients.

Biden’s immigration platform means millions of employment-authorized persons will enter the labor pool to compete for American jobs – not Williams’ well-paid, elitist job, but the type of employment that helps lower-skilled, less-educated minorities begin their ascent to the middle class. Williams is typical of mainstream media globalist reporters who refuse to connect the dots between immigration and work authorization which impedes upward mobility for minorities. The media has powerful allies that also favor waves of new employment-authorized immigrants even though they contribute to Black workers’ unemployment. The 55-member strong Congressional Black Caucus is united in its immigration advocacy, and votes accordingly.

A Biden presidency and the mass immigration that would accompany it will derail the economic recovery that blue-collar workers are just now enjoying. A Bloomberg report titled “Factory Owners Hiking Pay to Lure Workers Even with Jobless Rates” found that staffing firms in key U.S. cities are offering bonuses of up to $5 an hour to bolster the existing $12 an hour wage. Jobs posted with a wage scale of $12 – $14 an hour went wanting, but $17-hour positions were eagerly snapped up. President Trump’s tighter immigration policies have contributed to higher wages.

T. Willard Fair, the Urban League of Greater Miami’s chief executive officer, spoke the tough, honest talk that the Black Congressional Congress should heed. Fair once told the Miami Herald that amnesty for illegal workers is more than a slap in the faces of Black Americans; it’s an economic disaster that weakens African-Americans’ political empowerment. And in his congressional testimony, Fair said that “the interests of black Americans are clear: no amnesty, no guest workers, enforce the immigration law.”

History proves that Fair is right. The low-immigration, tight labor market years from 1924 to 1965 spawned impressive wage gains for all Americans. As the Journal of Economic Literature confirmed, white males’ real incomes expanded two-and-one-half-fold between 1940 and 1980, but for Black American men, those same incomes quadrupled, and closed the economic gap between the races.

Black Americans must listen to a true and fearless voice like Fair’s to help them reach the long-elusive economic stability that they deserve.

 
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.

Juan Williams Black Jobs Don’t Matter

Don’t Trust The Mail With Your Vote

Don’t Trust The Mail With Your Vote

By Pauline Braccio

There is a lot of debate about voting in person vs. voting by mail. 

I just want to let you know what happened when I mailed something to the District Court in Norristown. I purchased a Certificate of Mailing (see the copy) so that I would have proof that I did indeed send the paperwork within the thirty day time limit. That was on March 31. Since the courts were closed to the public, and no one was answering the phone, I was not aware that the court had not received the paperwork until late July.

Don't Trust The Mail With Your Vote
Proof of Mailing

Now the question is this: Were the clerks at the court told to “misrepresent” the truth and they actually received and discarded the paperwork or did the postal service fail to deliver it? 

Since I have the Certificate of Mailing, the postal service had it to deliver. But I do not have a signature verifying that it was received by the court.

The same question goes for mail-in ballots. They send you a ballot. You fill it out and mail it back. From what I understand, you should receive confirmation that it was received. In the primary this past May, I worked in the poll as the Judge of Election for my precinct. That day, twenty-four people who had applied for a mail-in ballot came in to vote because

1. They never received the ballot.

2. They received the incorrect ballot.

3. They did not get confirmation that their ballot was received.

4. They changed their mind and decided to vote in person after all.

Valid reasons, however, if you apply for a mail-in ballot, then for whatever reason you decide to come in and vote in person, you should know that you will not put a ballot through the scanner. You will fill out a Provisional Ballot. It will not be scanned. The provisional ballot gets put into a secure envelope and at the end of the day it travels to the tabulation site in Norristown via the Judge of Election’s car to a drop off site, then via the truck from the drop off to Norristown. 

Ed. Note: A rule has been changed for the general election so that if you bring your (unmarked) mail in ballot and envelopes to your polling place, they will be spoiled and you will be allowed to vote in person.

Sometimes the provisional ballots get delivered properly, sometimes the bags are “lost.” If they make it to the tabulation, the people who work there have to verify that a mail-in ballot was not received by them from you. That is why it is provisional. If they find your mail-in ballot, the provisional is not counted.

Either way, a mail-in ballot or a provisional ballot has to be handled by people and counted by people.

In-person voting is done through the scanner and is much, much more secure.

Note: If you apply for a mail-in, do it early, fill it out immediately, and mail it back. Hanging on to it serves no purpose, especially if you run out of time.

Anyway, you have to make up your mind. I just want you to know there are pitfalls if you choose to mail-in your ballot or go to the poll and fill out a provisional ballot. 

The best way is still to NOT apply for a mail-in and just go to the polls.

Ms. Braccio is a a resident of Towamencin Township in Montgomery County, Pa.

Don’t Trust The Mail With Your Vote

Remember American Workers This Labor Day

Remember American Workers This Labor Day

By Joe Guzzardi


Labor Day kicks off the final stretch toward the Election Day showdown between incumbent President Donald Trump and the Democratic challenger, former Vice President Joe Biden. After months of COVID-19-related layoffs, furloughs, outright firings, permanent closing of many small businesses and bankruptcy filings by major corporations, restoring jobs will be among the top issues on the candidates’ agendas.

Remember American Workers This Labor Day


Many of President Trump’s talking points are a mirror image of his successful 2016 platform: to prioritize American jobs, wages and security; to establish new immigration controls to boost wages, to ensure that available jobs are offered to Americans first and to curb foreign workers’ uncontrolled admission and thereby protect the economic well-being of already present lawful immigrants.

If re-elected, President Trump promises to, among his other goals and under the banner of “fighting for you,” create ten million new jobs and, as he did in 2016, “prohibit American companies from replacing United States citizens with lower-cost foreign workers.” But during his four years in office, President Trump got mixed-to-poor grades on ending American corporations’ cheap labor addiction.

On the positive side, within the last two months, President Trump intervened in the Tennessee Valley Authority’s plan to displace its American employees with H-1B visa workers. Hundreds of American jobs were saved. But, on the negative side, during his first term, President Trump has been unable – or perhaps unwilling – to keep other globalist corporations like Amazon, Google and Deloitte Consulting from tapping into the vast cheap labor pool.

Another related and alarming development: last week, President Trump moved to promote Chad Wolf, acting Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, to the position. From the perspective of U.S. tech workers, Wolf’s resume is troublesome. Before joining the White House, Wolf worked for the National Association of Software and Service Companies, a lobbying group that promotes outsourcing and offshoring of U.S. tech jobs to India.

In more disappointing news for unemployed and under-employed Americans, the State Department gutted President Trump’s June Executive Order that paused several employment-based visa categories until December 31. President Trump’s base hailed his action as a positive intervention on struggling American workers’ behalf. But, the State Department, in an advisory written in the vaguest imaginable language, will admit entry to foreign nationals that it deems, without having to provide a scintilla of evidence, essential to “the immediate and continued economic recovery of the U.S.” Deep State bureaucrats negated President Trump’s order, and opened the door for foreign nationals to take jobs that Americans deserve.

Also contributing to President Trump’s lukewarm immigration grade is his refusal to promote E-Verify, the federal program that confirms an individual’s legal privilege to work in the U.S. Analysts are in near unanimous agreement that E-Verify represents a more effective deterrent to illegal entry and hiring than a Southwest border wall. President Trump may have forgotten that winning an election only gave him possession of the ball; he still needed to score touchdowns.

Candidate Biden’s positions vis-à-vis immigration would, in the aggregate, provide work authorization to millions. Most obviously, Biden’s support for an amnesty that would be granted to more than 10 million illegal aliens would correspondingly expand the labor pool by that total. Biden also favors more visas for low- and high-skilled workers.

The economy has failed too many Americans. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a 10.2 percent unemployment rate in July. That doesn’t include the millions of workers who want but cannot find full-time jobs. African-Americans as well as other minorities, the less-educated and lower-skilled Americans can’t begin their climb toward the middle-class as long as they are unfairly and unnecessarily forced to compete with cheaper overseas labor.

Whether President Trump or Biden wins in November, putting American workers first should be the first and foremost goal of either.

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.

Remember American Workers This Labor Day

Trump Action Proves Employers Will Hire Locally

Trump Action Proves Employers Will Hire Locally

By Joe Guzzardi


Vindicated! For employment-based visa critics who have railed for more than three decades that each entering worker represents a lost U.S. job, late August provided more evidence to support their thesis. Reports from Colorado and New Jersey confirmed the obvious: if foreign nationals aren’t around to take coveted summer jobs on the J-1 visa – billed as offering cultural and educational exchange opportunities – then employers hire locally.

When President Trump’s Executive Order paused several employment-based visas that include the J-1 Summer Work Travel (SWT) visa, Colorado ski resorts panicked. Aspen Skiing Company officials, which typically hire 400 J-1 exchange workers each season, told the media that their concern over a potential worker shortage kept them tossing and turning. But to their surprise, lo and behold, U.S. kids submitted applications. Young Americans are available, willing and eager to earn extra cash by taking jobs at Colorado ski resorts in Aspen, Vail, Buttermilk and Snowmass.

Trump Action Proves Employers Will Hire Locally

On the nation’s eastern seaboard, in New Jersey, came yet more hopeful news. The Casino Association of New Jersey, Unite Here Local 54, the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority, and city and state governments announced plans to scale back J-1 employment. The coalition announced that it would begin a vocational training program to prioritize jobs for residents. As the Casino Association of New Jersey and Caesars Entertainment regional presidents said: put Atlantic City people to work fir

If those New Jersey casinos had attempted to set betting probabilities on whether the cheap labor lobby would have sued President Trump for his Executive Order, the odds would have been prohibitively high. Several ski resort operators have taken legal action to block President Trump’s Executive Order and keep their easy access to cheap labor flowing. Annually, thousands of international students from dozens of countries take domestic jobs.

The J-1 SWT program is a hurtful hoax that robs young Americans of opportunities to earn money to put toward their college educations and contribute to family incomes. Here’s a sampling of why the SWT program, often referred to as the Exchange Visitor Program, is such a scam. To begin with, the July report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics pegged youth unemployment at 18.5 percent. Given the July unemployment level, up from 9.1 percent a year ago, no intellectual argument can be made that employers need foreign-born workers.

But, naturally, advocates advance staggeringly vapid arguments that the SWT is good for the nation. Try this preposterous talking point on for size. Fariba Hicks, vice-president for Camp Counselors USA, which annually sponsors more than 15,000 international J-1s, insists that those young workers actually create jobs. Talk about not computing! Overseas workers take American jobs, but at the same time create jobs?

Nice try, Fariba!

Camp Counselors USA and similar placement agencies soak naïve young foreigners for fees that range from $1,500 to $5,000 per head. Employers under-pay their gullible international students, allegedly present for cultural exchange, but at the same time, their bosses are exempt from making Medicare and Social Security payments, a sweet deal for them. A Government Accountability Office report found that only about 40 percent of J-1s engage in cultural exchange.

Another insulting pro-cheap worker visa claim is that employers simply cannot find Americans to fill their jobs, a statement they make with a straight face, but that measures 10 out of 10 on the absurdity scale. Employers have repeatedly said, summer after summer, that they can’t find kids to work at beach resorts, national parks, community swimming pools, tony restaurants, gelato shops or amusement parks. The truth, as everyone knows, is that those are among the most sought-after teenage jobs which, had they not been routinely given to SWTs, would generate fierce domestic competition for hiring.

True vindication in the battle to put American workers first, however, can’t come until Congress changes course from its 30-year preference to hire abroad.


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.

Trump Action Proves Employers Will Hire Locally