Category: Guest Authors

Hard Part of Afghan Assimilation Now Begins

By Joe Guzzardi

Afghan evacuee resettlement is now in Phase Three, the crucial stage where assimilation, the Biden administration’s forbidden word, will determine how their American lives evolve.

Phase One occurred when the Afghans boarded, some peacefully, others with force, outbound planes. Phase Two happened when evacuees were temporarily housed in U.S. military bases abroad and across America. And last week, the Biden administration announced that the last group of evacuees has been relocated from a New Jersey military site to more than 200 communities, joining 76,000 other Afghans spread across the U.S. since America abruptly withdrew from Kabul. Children comprise about 40 percent of the total evacuee population.

Since the evacuees first stepped foot onto U.S. soil, they’ve benefited from a special halal food menu, faith-based services, English language instruction, vaccinations for COVID-19 and other diseases including measles, assistance with immigration paperwork, and medical services for medevacked patients and pre-natal treatment for pregnant women.

For now, at least, the media, based on information given to it by the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency is reporting that, with cooperation from nonprofit resettlement agencies and private citizen groups, the Afghans are transitioning smoothly into their new circumstances. “I think the biggest lesson for the administration to take away from this operation is that the American public is overwhelmingly in support of immigrants and refugees being a part of their communities,” said National Immigration Forum president Ali Noorani optimistically.

But now comes the challenging part of the Afghans’ long journey. From unpublished data CBS News obtained, of the more than 67,000 Afghans processed at the domestic military bases, 35,128 evacuees – or over half – have been resettled in Texas, California, Virginia, Washington, Pennsylvania, New York, Florida and Arizona. The evacuees’ presence will place additional burdens on the states’ already strained budgets for public schools, health care and other affirmative services, costs that will hit taxpayers in their pocketbooks. Individual states had no voice in the resettlement process. As of year-end 2021, analysts estimated that the cost to resettle Afghans was about $7 billion.

Another concern that officials continue to gloss over is how thoroughly the Afghan evacuees were vetted. Under intense questioning during a November Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas admitted that, despite some news reports to the contrary, “We are not conducting in-person, full refugee interviews of 100 percent” of Afghan evacuees. Those unvetted may pose a threat to the homeland.

The immediate urgency among the resettlement agencies is addressing the evacuees’ immigration status. For now, they’ve been granted humanitarian parole, usually reserved for individual, emergency cases, not granted to thousands at a time. Under immigration law, the Afghans aren’t eligible for permanent residency. Qualifying as refugees, potentially another option for a Green Card, takes years to complete. While their status gets sorted out, the evacuees will receive lifetime valid work permits, a benefit that will allow them to enter the labor market.

An important but unresolved question concerns the wisdom of removing people from their native land, culture, language, families and religion, and placing them literally overnight in an entirely different society and surrounding. In a Foreign Affairs article titled “Help Refugees Help Themselves,” authors Alexander Betts, University of Oxford Professor of Forced Migration and International Affairs, and Paul Collier, a British development economist, wrote that an effective refugee policy should “improve the lives of the refugees in the short term” and the prospects of the region [from where they migrated] in the long term, and it should also serve the economic and security interests of the host states.

Restated, Betts and Collier think refugees, or in this case, evacuees, should return home to build back the country that they fled. Collier expanded on his concept in The New York Times when he wrote that the U.S. priority should be to design refugee policies that will “reconcile our duty of rescue with the legitimate concerns of post-conflict governments to attract back the people who could rebuild their countries.” Lawful permanent residency does the opposite; it keeps people anchored to the U.S.

The solution of Betts and Collier has support from, among others, the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader who said of refugees at a conference in Sweden, “Receive them, help them, educate them … but ultimately they should develop their own country.”

Talk has already started about how to frame a Ukrainian resettlement policy should the Ukraine’s conflict with Russia escalate. The Biden White House as well as future presidential administrations should realize that the U.S. has limits to growth and to its capacity to correct, through resettlement, all that ails the world.

Joe Guzzardi is a PFIR analyst who writes about immigration and its consequences. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org and joe.guzzardi@substack.com.

Hard Part of Afghan Assimilation Now Begins

Don Newcombe Used Alcoholic Tragedy To Heal Others

By Joe Guzzardi

Late in his long and memorable life, Brooklyn Dodgers ace Don Newcombe said that helping people get sober meant more to him than all his baseball accomplishments. Considering that the 6’4”/240-lb. Newcombe won the 1949 Rookie of the Year award, captured the first Cy Young Award in 1956, and in that same year was named the National League’s Most Valuable Player, his statement about the importance of helping others is powerful.

Newcombe is the only player in baseball history to win ROY, MVP and Cy Young titles. In 1956, “Big Newk” went 27-7, an improvement over his 1955 20-5 record. For good measure, Newcombe during those two years, hit a combined .298, with nine home runs and 16 extra base hits. During his career with the Dodgers, the Cincinnati Reds and the Cleveland Indians, Newcombe won 163 games and had a stellar .614 winning percentage. Newcombe could always wield the lumber; his batting average for his 12-year Major League Baseball stint was .269 with 52 extra base hits that included 15 home runs.

Newcombe, the third black MLB pitcher after the Dodgers’ Dan Bankhead and the Cleveland Indians’ Satchel Paige, was a workhorse who routinely pitched on two days of rest, and in 1950 started both ends of a double header against the Philadelphia Phillies. In the opener, Newk hurled a complete game shutout and, in the nightcap, pitched into the seventh inning. Newcombe’s pitching line for the day: 16 IP, H 11, ER 2, BB 2, SO 3. During the Korean War, when the U.S. Army drafted the New York Giants’ Willie Mays and Newcombe. Dodger manager Chuck Dressen cried foul. “Losing Newcombe is worse than losing Mays. Where can you get a pitcher like that?” he asked.

As he dominated National League batters, unbeknownst to his teammates, Newcombe was deeply caught up in alcoholism’s throes. After the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles in 1958, Newcombe’s time with the team became short-lived. The pitcher had a fear of flying, and his fellow Dodgers noticed that he relied on alcohol to overcome his apprehensions. Society for American Baseball Research historian Russell Bergtold wrote that 1957 was a turning point for Newcombe. The Dodgers, 84-70, finished in third place, 14 games behind the Milwaukee Braves. Newcombe was an unimpressive 11-12, but made off-the-field headlines for the wrong reasons. On August 21, after pitching a five-hit shutout over the Cincinnati Reds, Newcombe was driving his father home when he struck a four-year-old boy with his car. A few months later, Newcombe and two of his brothers were accused of assaulting a former East Orange New Jersey policeman at Newcombe’s Newark tavern. The vehicle incident was settled out of court for $5,000, and the Newcombe brothers were acquitted in court trial.

Alcohol may have been the common denominator in Newcombe’s troubles with the law. In 1965, Newcombe told the monthly magazine “Ebony” that for many years “he was a stupefied, wife-abusing, child-frightening, falling-down drunk,” behavior that explained his temperamental, belligerent baseball outbursts and led to his 1960 divorce from wife Freddie Green. To finance his alcohol dependency, Newcombe sold his 1955 World Series ring and an expensive watch before he declared bankruptcy. Peter O’Malley, then-Dodgers vice president, bought back the ring and watch, and returned them to a grateful Newcombe. Finally, in 1966, Newcombe’s second wife, Billie Roberts, threatened to leave him, and take their two children unless he quit drinking.

Roberts’ ultimatum was the catalyst that put the pitcher on a life-long campaign to raise awareness about, and fight against, alcohol abuse. As a recovering alcoholic, Newk created the Dodger’s substance abuse awareness program, and became a National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism consultant, as well as the New Beginning Alcohol and Drug Treatment Program special projects director. Newcombe rejoined the Dodger organization in the late 1970s and served as the team’s Director of Community Affairs. In March 2009, he was named special advisor to Dodgers chairman Frank McCourt.

Looking back, Newcombe said that alcohol may have cost him his place in the Hall of Fame: “I was only 34 [when he retired], but the alcohol had taken its toll. I think it shortened my major-league career by about six or seven years. I regret that I didn’t take better care of myself in the latter part of my career because I would like to have made the Hall of Fame, where I think I belong.”

On his website, Newcombe wrote: “What I have done after my baseball career and being able to help people with their lives and getting their lives back on track and they become human beings again – means more to me than all the things I did in baseball.”

After a long illness, Newcombe died at age 92 in Los Angeles in 2019 knowing that he had helped many of his fellow Dodgers get sober and live happier, more fulfilling lives.

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

Don Newcombe Used Alcoholic Tragedy To Heal Others Don Newcombe Used Alcoholic Tragedy To Heal Others

Biden Violates Take Care Clause

By Joe Guzzardi

Finally! Vice President Kamala Harris, during a recent interview, said that the effects of the Biden administration’s border policy won’t be realized “overnight.” Let’s calculate just how accurate Harris is. Between now and January 2024, and using 2021 when 2 million aliens crossed into the United States as a model, the Biden administration will likely allow 8 million illegal immigrants to unlawfully enter and settle in the U.S. The “effect” on local communities, schools, transportation and hospitals will be incalculable.

The 2 million total excludes what border agents refer to as “gotaways,” individuals who evaded Border Patrol capture and now roam the interior freely. Once inside the U.S., they may or may not be found, or eventually deported.

One example is Geraldo Pando, a multiple-times deportee with a 35-page criminal history that includes felonies committed in Colorado. He was arrested for vandalizing the U.S. Capitol Police headquarters and released. A week later he was defacing Washington’s Union Station with swastikas. The Biden administration’s soft-on-crime policy and tolerance of unlawful immigration prevented Immigration and Customs Enforcement from processing Pando for deportation.

Official ICE statistics prove how passive the Biden administration is about deporting criminals. During 2021, according to a preliminary ICE release, only 55,590 immigration violators were removed. For comparison, deportations totaled 267,258 in FY 2019; under Biden, ICE removals have decreased by nearly 80 percent. Moreover, the first four months of FY 2021 occurred during the Trump presidency – a period when ICE removals were significantly higher. Approximately 28,000 of the FY 2021 removals of the 55,590 occurred while President Trump was still in office.

In the meantime, the worst criminal elements are laughing at the U.S. for its willingness to open its borders and to allow and encourage felonious behavior, including some U.S. citizen-perpetrated, that reaps billions in illicit cash. Wrong-doers, aware of the fortunes that can be gained through drug and human trafficking, devise increasingly clever schemes to smuggle aliens. Benign looking vehicles are the method of choice. Last year near the Texas border, agents seized a white ice cream truck with its flavors and Frito Pie advertised on the side. Inside, agents found 15 illegal immigrants, and two American citizens stacked on top of each other. Then in mid-February, agents found a child daycare van loaded with more than 20 Guatemalans. Agents also apprehended two aliens who had child sex offenses on their records and MS-13 gang members.

Nearly nonexistent enforcement and specifically the passivity of Biden, Harris and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas have created a nation-altering crisis. Mayorkas acknowledged that he’s allowed border chaos to fester. In an audio recording which agents taped during their January meeting with Mayorkas at the Yuma Sector, the secretary said that his job has grown increasingly difficult at the start of this year, more so than 2021, which he admitted was “very, very difficult.” Mayorkas added that with worldwide migrants surging the border, he expects no pause in alien crossings. In fact, warmer spring weather could exacerbate border agents’ overload.

Border agents don’t want to hear Mayorkas confess to his poor performance; they’re abundantly aware of his multiple failures. The agents hoped for, but didn’t get, his pledge to allow them to return to their duties – protecting the homeland, not processing family units for release into the interior.

Biden hasn’t so much as hinted at a course change that might deviate from his administration’s repeated federal immigration law violations and its dismissal of the Constitution’s Take Care Clause, which means the President has a duty to ensure that U.S. laws are faithfully executed. The president’s sworn duty is to make sure that those around him faithfully execute the nation’s laws, a responsibility that Mayorkas has blatantly shirked.

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

Biden Violates Take Care Clause

Amnesty Always Solution for Zealots

By Joe Guzzardi

Soon after 9/11, immigration activists began a full-scale lobbying effort to encourage Congress to pass an illegal alien amnesty. Their stance was that if illegal aliens received lawful permanent residency, then they would, in the advocates’ terminology, “come out of the shadows.” In the end, the narrative continued, newly legalized aliens would become citizens, embrace the American way, and those that once harbored ill-will against the United States, like the 9/11 terrorists, would eventually assimilate.

Amnesty just months after 9/11 was, on its face, an impossible-to-sell idea, mainly because most of the 9/11 perpetrators were not “in the shadows,” but legally present. In his report, “The Open Door: How Militant Islamic Terrorists Entered the United States, 1993-2001,” Steven A. Camarota found that at the time they committed their crimes, 16 terrorists of the 48 total involved, directly or indirectly, were on temporary visas, mostly tourist visas; 17 were Lawful Permanent Residents or naturalized U.S. citizens, and 12 were illegal aliens.

But amnesty is like the proverbial cork; right after it’s submerged into water, the cork pops back up. In the more than two decades since 9/11, amnesties large and small have been defeated, but swiftly reappeared in other bills. Some amnesties have been introduced in Congress, and were significant in their scope: the 2005 McCain-Kennedy bill and the 2013 Gang of Eight bill. Although heavily promoted as bipartisan and reformative, both nevertheless died in Congress. The most recent amnesty effort wasn’t as straightforward as the previous two. Although amnesty wasn’t advertised as its primary feature, Build Back Better still would have granted the biggest mass pardon in history, about 6.5 million aliens, and would cost taxpayers about $111 billion.

For today, BBB in its massive fiscal totality is stalled. Without missing a beat, however, the amnesty-or-bust crowd is back to work with another far-fetched angle that it should be embarrassed to advance. Their proposed solution to stall raging inflation: press on with BBB’s amnesty via a parole provision that would grant work authorization to illegal immigrants. Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) tweeted that “a comprehensive immigration reform bill,” code words for amnesty, “would help cut inflation.” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who has spent his 30-plus years in Congress voting “yea” for the majority of the immigration expansion bills put before him, agrees. When reporters asked Durbin to share his thoughts about the new amnesty pitch, the Senate Judiciary Chair said: “Oh, most certainly … If there are more workers filling those jobs, it’s deflationary.”

Clemson University energy and sustainability professor Mark Thies wrote a Newsweek opinion piece titled “The Democrats Plan to Fix Inflation: Squeeze Blue-Collar Americans” that chronicled the multiple fallacies in Democrats’ talking points, reiterated year after year but never proven, that immigration benefits Americans. This time around, Democrats illogically argue that more immigration and amnesty will help curb the 40-year high inflation rate that’s crippling the middle class. While it’s true that importing more foreign workers who will become U.S. consumers grows the economy and increases GDP, it’s equally true and much more consequential that more foreign-born consumers don’t increase per-capita GDP. Fundamental economic theory proves that the overwhelming majority of immigration-driven increases in economic activity goes to the immigrants themselves in the form of wages and other compensation. Immigration doesn’t benefit the native-born population.

Should the Democrats’ amnesty vision come true, every paroled or amnestied immigrant will receive lifetime valid work authorization that will enable him to compete with or displace an American worker. If BBB provides millions more work-authorized immigrants, then also add the 1 million lawful permanent residents who arrive annually, the roughly 750,000 temporary guest workers, the asylum and refugee arrivals, and the conclusion is that the U.S. has an immigrant labor overage at a time when millions of Americans are unemployed or underemployed. Not yet considered are last year’s 2 million illegal immigrant border surgers who will stay in the U.S. permanently, and will eventually get employment authorization or, alternatively, enter the underground economy. More cheap labor is a constant threat to working Americans’ job security, inconsequential to congressional Democrats.

Independent and undecided voters wonder what’s happened to the traditional Democratic Party that once prided itself as working Americans’ staunchest ally. The Democratic Party of old is long gone, and today is willfully determined to undermine U.S. citizens’ economic best interests in order to advance the elite donor class. With the 2022 mid-term elections less than nine months away, analysts wonder whether Democrats will shift to the middle to woo the swing voters they’ll need in order to keep their congressional majority. So far, no indication has surfaced that a course change is in the immediate future. So that all Americans may prosper, the U.S. needs Democrats of the mindset from an earlier era to return to the fold. As President Theodore Roosevelt often said, if federal policies don’t work for everyone, they don’t work for anyone.

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

Amnesty Always Solution for Zealots Amnesty Always Solution for Zealots

Texas Gov Race Is Ground Zero In Immigration Battle

By Joe Guzzardi

Texas will hold its gubernatorial primary March 1, with a runoff scheduled for May 24, if no candidate receives more than 50 percent of the vote. The question that Texas voters will face on Election Day, Nov. 8, is whether a Democrat, likely to be two-time loser Robert O’Rourke, with a failed 2018 Senate bid and 2020 presidential campaign run that went nowhere, and an open border apologist who favors Second Amendment restrictions, can win in Texas, illegal immigration’s ground zero.

The first hurdle for incumbent Gov. Greg Abbott is getting past the primary. No incumbent Texas governor lost his or her – Ann Richards (D) 1991 to 1995 – party’s nomination since 1978, when Gov. Dolph Briscoe (D) lost to then-Attorney General John Hill (D). Abbott, however, is facing strong primary challengers. They are Texas State Senator and real estate developer Don Huffines and Allen West, a retired U.S. Army Lieutenant who represented Florida’s 22^nd Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 2011 to 2013. Until he resigned to launch his gubernatorial campaign, West served as the Republican Party of Texas’ chairman. Huffines and West have criticized Abbott for his coronavirus restrictions that included mask mandates and business shutdowns that they view as unconstitutional, and an unnecessary obstruction to Texans’ freedom.

Abbott’s performance ratings are weak. The Hobby School of Public Affairs at the University of Houston and the University of Texas both found that 40 percent of Texans have an unfavorable opinion of the sitting governor. Nevertheless, Abbott is favored to prevail, and will probably meet O’Rourke in November, a match up that, because of their starkly different immigration positions, should favor the incumbent.

O’Rourke knows that in Texas immigration enforcement will be a game breaker, and he’s choosing his language judiciously. The O’Rourke of today may have a tough time escaping the O’Rourke that pursued the 2020 presidential nomination. Posted on his website, O’Rourke wrote that he wants Texas to have a “legal, orderly system of immigration and uphold our country’s asylum laws.” Texans recognize these words as code for amnesty, an O’Rourke goal that’s unchanged from 21 months ago.

At an April 2019 Iowa town hall, the former U.S. representative said that giving amnesty to all 12 to 25 million illegal aliens will make American citizens – and specifically, the Angel Families whose loved ones have been murdered by criminal aliens – “demonstrably safer.” O’Rourke’s premise that once aliens “get right with the law…come into the light of day [and presumably out of the ever-present shadows]… and contribute to the success of the country…” then everything will be fine. These platitudes have never been proven true.

On border issues, O’Rourke, because of his past support for amnesty, and his failure to meaningfully criticize illegal immigration, has boxed himself in. Abbott, even though his primary opponents argue that he should do more to stop the illegal immigrant border surge, has poured hundreds of millions to strengthen border security that includes sending Department of Public Safety troops and the National Guard to the Rio Grande. Hispanic voters, a key bloc, approve of Abbott’s immigration actions; 45 percent gave Abbott an approval rating on immigration, but only 37 percent gave Biden, from whom O’Rourke will have trouble distancing himself, an immigration thumbs-up. O’Rourke will not ask Biden to join him on the campaign trail, and said that his campaign will not be about anyone outside of Texas. He will, however, accept out-of-state donations. The O’Rourke coffers have nearly $9 million as of the most recent tally, about $40 million less than Abbott.

Other issues will play an important role as the campaigns of Abbott and O’Rourke shift into high gear: Texas’ power grid, a woman’s right to choose and inflation are also important to Texans.

The Dallas Morning News and the University of Texas Tyler poll has Abbott with a commanding 11-point lead. But running behind early in the game isn’t O’Rourke’s greatest concern. The border remains open and chaotic. Based on the 2021 statistics, between today and early November, hundreds of thousands of new illegal immigrants will cross into Texas, an albatross that even the most skilled campaigner can’t talk his way out of.

A PFIR analyst, Joe Guzzardi writes about immigration issues and impacts. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org.

Texas Gov Race Is Ground Zero In Immigration Battle Texas Gov Race Is Ground Zero In Immigration Battle