Category: Guest Authors

Challenges Await Resettled Afghans

By Joe Guzzardi

Rental costs across the United States are rising at the fastest rate in decades. Because the COVID-related, federally mandated eviction moratoriums have been lifted, landlords can boot out existing tenants, increase rents and find new occupants. Landlords can reap windfall profits from the new ground rules, but at the expense of the many people who find themselves either homeless or anxious about the possibility of becoming homeless.

In some of the most sought-after destinations, rent has soared faster and higher than the national average. Record high rents, some as high as 40 percent above previous listings, have been seen in New York City, Los Angeles, Miami and Austin. Recently, prospective Manhattan renters waited more than an hour to view an East Village, 371-square-foot, one-bedroom, third-floor walk-up listed for $2,337.39 a month.

Among those caught up in the dramatic rental price spike are the recently arrived Afghan evacuees. The Department of State’s Reception and Placement Program provides the paroled Afghan evacuees – they don’t have refugee status – with initial resettlement services for up to three months. This includes $2,275 per refugee resettled, with $1,225 of that money going toward food, shelter and clothing. The evacuees are eligible for a long list of affirmative social services programs that include Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), Medicaid, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Supplemental Security Income, Head Start, Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women Infants and Children (WIC). Some Afghan families range in size from 6-11 persons which means they require more expensive and harder-to-find three- or four-bedroom units.

As challenging as finding short-term rentals is, long-term housing is more difficult. Evacuees are, for the most part, unemployed, have no credit history and generally are required to provide the first and last months’ rent in advance as well as a security deposit, an aggregate sum that can total several thousand dollars. In Minneapolis, where rent for a 778-square-foot apartment averages $1,621, Gul Rahim finds himself, his family of 13 and his pregnant wife facing eviction. Rahim doesn’t have a job and, since he doesn’t speak English and is caring for his ill and pregnant wife, can’t look for one either. Of Minneapolis’ 1,200 evacuees, 600 like Rahim are confronting a housing crisis and may soon join the city’s substantial homeless population.

As grave as the affordable housing shortage is for the evacuees, adjusting to U.S. K-12 public schools will present equally weighty problems for their children. Afghanistan has a dual education process that differs significantly from the U.S. In Afghanistan, two parallel systems ongoing at the same time. First, religious education is the responsibility of clerics at mosques, and second, the government provides free academic education at state schools. As for U.S. teachers, helping the Afghans will add to their already-substantial responsibility to instruct other international students. Overcrowded schools are coping with millions of English language learners and will now have to instruct Afghan speakers whose native languages are Dari and Pashto. Teacher time spent on English language learners detracts from the instruction that citizen children should receive, the lack of which harms their quality of education. The greater the number of students in a classroom, the less attention each student can receive from the teacher. This particularly affects students who are struggling and need the extra attention.

The housing emergency that many Afghans are dealing with and the K-12 tribulations that lay ahead are the predictable outcomes of the Biden administration’s hasty, botched withdrawal. Moreover, the open border will create the same set of housing and schooling problems for more than 1 million foreign nationals that have arrived from 150 different countries. They’ll all need places to live and education for their children. The question that Biden and his inner circle never asked is what comes next after millions of illegal aliens and evacuees arrive and need nurturing. If the question were ever asked, no one thought to consider the obvious answer – America has enough affordable housing and education woes without compounding them by importing millions more needy people.

Joe Guzzardi writes about immigration issues and impacts. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org and joeguzzardi.substack.com.

Challenges Await Resettled Afghans

Ike Only Prez Who Played Pro Ball — And It Was A No No

By Joe Guzzardi

Since baseball’s earliest years, U.S. presidents have been big fans of the national pastime. Among the most avid baseball fans were William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson and Richard M. Nixon. After his political career ended, the players’ union lobbied to have Nixon appointed to head the Major League Baseball Players Association.

Only Dwight Eisenhower played professional baseball, and therein lays a tale. Eisenhower grew up in rural Abilene, Kan., starred as a right end in football and excelled in center field on his 1908 high school baseball team. Ike’s brother Edgar played fullback and first base. Since the Eisenhower family couldn’t afford to send both boys to college, the brothers struck a deal. Edgar went to the University of Michigan, while Dwight worked at a local creamery and sent his wages to his brother.

At age 21, Ike won an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy in West Point and became a star running back alongside another future WWII general, Omar Bradley. The New York Times called Ike “one of the most promising running backs in Eastern football,” but a knee injury ended Eisenhower’s football days. And to what Eisenhower called “one of the greatest disappointments of my life…maybe the greatest,” he didn’t make the Army baseball team.

But Ike had a baseball secret, one that could have altered his life’s course had it become known while he was at West Point. The year before Ike enrolled, and using the pseudonym “Wilson,” he played professional baseball in the Class D Central Kansas League as the Junction City Soldiers’ center fielder. Ike once told the Associated Press that he played poorly and was paid little. But setting off for college, Ike needed even the small sums he earned.

Years later, at a game Ike attended between the New York Giants and the Boston Braves, managers Mel Ott and Bob Coleman asked General Eisenhower to confirm whether he had played professionally, and if so, at what position. Ike half-kiddingly replied, “That’s my secret.”

Ike’s desire for secrecy is understandable. The NCAA has strict rules that prohibit student athletes from playing professionally. If found to have received compensation, the consequences, as Olympic decathlon star Jim Thorpe discovered, are severe. Thorpe was stripped of his two 1912 Olympic gold medals when the committee learned that he had played two seasons of semi-professional baseball and had therefore violated the amateurism rules. For Eisenhower, his punishment would have been immediate expulsion from West Point.

It’s likely Eisenhower knew that he had broken the West Point Code of Honor when he signed a 15-question legibility card attesting to his amateur status. As years passed, Ike stopped talking about his baseball-playing years, instructing his staff to dodge questions. A memo found among Ike’s presidential papers at the Abilene Eisenhower Library read: “As of August 1961, DDE indicated inquiries should not be answered concerning his participation in professional baseball – as it would necessarily become too complicated.”

Had West Point expelled Eisenhower, he might never have become the general who led the Allied forces to victory in World War II, might never have presided as Columbia University’s president and might never have served two U.S. presidential terms.

From his earliest days, Ike truly loved baseball. His favorite story recalls the time when, on a warm Kansas afternoon, he and a young friend went river fishing and fantasized aloud about their futures. The friend told Ike that one day he wanted to be the U.S. president. Dwight said that “he wanted to be a real major league baseball player like Honus Wagner.” In the end, Ike concluded, “Neither one of us got our wish.”

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

Ike Only Prez Who Played Pro Ball — And It Was A No No