Category: Guest Authors

Who Needs Congress? D.C.’s New Normal

By Joe Guzzardi

In a late Friday afternoon announcement, the Department of Homeland Security expanded the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, STEM, Optional Practical Training, STEM OPT. Now, F-1 student visa OPT candidates can have degrees in bioenergy, general forestry, forest resources production and management, human-centered technology design, cloud computing, anthrozoology, climate science, earth systems science, economics and computer science, environmental geosciences, geobiology, geography and environmental studies, mathematical economics, mathematics, atmospheric and oceanic science, general data science, general data analytics, business analytics, data visualization, financial analytics, other data analytics, industrial and organizational psychology, and social sciences, research methodology, and quantitative methods. The complete 22-career long list is intended to give readers the full scope of its dire consequences to U.S. students and professionals, not to bog them down.

DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas issued a press release and posted a notice in the Federal Register, but the news barely made a blip in the media or even on business channels. STEM OPT’s expansion, however, is significant since the thousands of new foreign-born workers entering the labor pool will adversely affect employed U.S. tech workers or recent U.S. STEM graduates whose prospective careers could be jeopardized.

“Practical training” is a purposely deceptive phrase; in reality, “training,” defined in real terms, means work authorization, a benefit that wasn’t included for F-1 student visas in the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act. Students were expected to return home when they completed their courses of study. In a major and legally questionable departure from the INA, 70 years later, the biggest guest worker program is the F-1 student visa holder.

Joining DHS in making job searches harder for young Americans, the State Department also did its hurtful best. State doubled the time period for J-1 visa travelers, allegedly in the U.S. on a cultural exchange visit, from 18 to 36 months. Investigative journalists have extensively reported that J-1 visa holders, far from participating in cultural exchange, are often employed at jobs Americans will do. The visa is used to import workers whose professions range from au pair to medical doctor.

DHS’ unexpected proclamation offers insight into how today’s federal government works: wealthy elitists team up with high-ranking administration officials at exclusive functions, then lobby for special considerations that will benefit them while falsely claiming America will be the winner. Finally, the insiders, operating in secret, do an end run around Congress to put their destructive policies into place without the appropriate congressional committee debate or vote.

In 2008, OPT mushroomed from a one-year program that took effect after students graduated to 29 months. During a Georgetown cocktail party, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates complained to then-Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff that Congress’ refusal to authorize more H-1B visas above the existing cap impaired Silicon Valley’s ability to maximize its profits. At that time, 65,000 new H-1B visas were available, with an additional 20,000 visas provided to holders of U.S. university-earned master’s degrees or higher. In 2015, the Obama administration, again without congressional approval, increased the OPT F-1 visa overstay authorization period to 36 months.

Rich, powerful and well-connected Gates and Chertoff proved to be a combination that, when they set out to achieve their mutual goal to provide Silicon Valley with more cheap labor, left U.S. tech workers out in the cold. Then-President George W. Bush, an immigration advocate, could have interceded on behalf of Americans, but chose not to.

That’s the new Washington, D.C. normal – agencies make and enforce regulations as law without congressional approval, and the administration ignores the unlawful procedures, pretending that all is well in the nation’s capital. As for displaced U.S. tech workers or struggling graduates, thanks to DHS’ open-borders Mayorkas, U.S. specialists who studied in the 22 STEM fields are left to fend for themselves. Mayorkas realizes the harm he’s inflicting on the nation’s prospective white-collar workers, and he knows that Americans object to prioritizing foreign workers. In his tweet that announced the STEM OPT expansion, Mayorkas purposely omitted “foreign student” to create the false impression that DHS is investing in domestic STEM talent.

OPT has been in litigation for more than a decade, challenging whether OPT holders who are no longer students can legally be allowed to work. For all those years, U.S. tech workers have taken the brunt of the government’s illegal ploys that are used against them indiscriminately to give foreign nationals an advantage in the high-skilled labor market.

Joe Guzzardi is a syndicated columnist and PFIR analyst who writes about immigration issues and impacts. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org and joeguzzardi.substack.com.

Who Needs Congress? D.C.’s New Normal

More Foreign Workers Coming To USA

By Joe Guzzardi

During the peak days of coronavirus, Amazon delivery trucks were a familiar sight in neighborhoods across America. Amazon’s logo is a smiley face arrow pointing from “A” to “Z” indicating that the company offers customers products that range from those with names that begin with the letter “a” and all through to the letter “z,” in other words, everything. Shopping at Amazon, the smiling arrow promises, will make consumers happy.

What began in 1994 in Jeff Bezos’ garage as an online bookstore, then called “Cadabra” and with initial earnings of $20,000, Amazon is now recognized worldwide as the place to shop for products as diverse as AAA batteries or zinc tablets, and have them promptly delivered to your front door quickly. Today, Amazon’s market cap is $1.7 trillion. As of January 2022, Bezos is the world’s richest man with a net worth of $195 billion. Amazon is a great American success story. If only Amazon and its founder Jeff Bezos could use their billions-strong financial strength to share their wealth by hiring more Americans and paying them fairly instead of opting for lower-cost overseas workers, their accomplishments might be more broadly hailed.

But when Amazon wants to hire workers, it too often relies on the insidious H-1B, guest worker employment-based visa to fill its needs. In fiscal years 2020 and 2021, at 6,182, Amazon received more approvals for H-1B visas than any other corporation; Microsoft, Google and IBM received 1,200 or more. Worse news for U.S. tech workers is that the decline rate for H-1B visas has, under President Joe Biden, dropped to its lowest level in history which means that more tech jobs will go to Indian and Chinese nationals instead of U.S. citizens.

The National Foundation for American Policy calculated that only 4 percent of petitions were denied in FY 2021, down from 13 percent in FY 2020 and down from the high of 24 percent in FY 2018. NFAP wrote that the status of many H-1B extensions was reviewed under a more restrictive standard than the Trump administration. Those tighter guidelines gave officers at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services more discretion to require additional proof that entry-level computer programming jobs qualify as a “specialty occupation,” a basic requirement for receiving an H-1B visa.

Courts later ruled that the Trump era memo was unlawful. NFAP also wrote that “employers and attorneys have credited USCIS Director Ur Jaddou and the Biden administration for rescinding the October 2017 memo.” Big business, lawyers and the Americans Last Biden White House, all unlimited immigration advocates, hailed Jaddou’s intervention, and defended the H-1B revision as helpful to corporations struggling to find what they term as “high-skilled” or the “best and brightest” employees, myths that have been perpetuated for decades.

The Census Bureau’s 2019 Community Survey, Single-Year Estimates found that among the 50 million employed college graduates ages 25 to 64 in 2019, 37 percent reported a bachelor’s degree in science or engineering but only 14 percent worked in a science, technology, engineering or math-related (STEM) occupations. U.S. tech workers are plentiful, but employers have to seek them out.

Through a series of loopholes, Congress has enabled H-1B visa holders to, instead of the initial six-year time cap on their visas – one three-year period followed by a three-year renewal – remain to work indefinitely, and become U.S. citizens. Because of the “dual intent” provision, H-1B visas holders can now displace American workers, and are rewarded with citizenship. Stated differently, admitted under the guise of being temporary, H-1B holders can become the most permanent of residents, a U.S. citizen.

The decline in H-1B denials trend is guaranteed to continue during Biden’s remaining three years in the White House. The president’s critics wonder why he’s so steadfastly determined to harms both high- and low-skilled U.S. workers. The border influx of mostly limited-skilled and under-educated migrants harm Americans at the lower end of the economic spectrum, while, at the same time, loosening the H-1B visa standards puts college-educated Americans behind the eight-ball when it comes to securing a white-collar job.

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 Foreign Workers Coming To USA

More Foreign Workers Coming To USA

Black Caucus Ignores Wage Gap Solutions

By Joe Guzzard

The Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday came and went, as it always does, without a peep from the Congressional Black Caucus about how the influential U.S. representatives could most help African-Americans. If the powerful Caucus, 58 members strong, would demand an immigration pause, black Americans could close the earnings gap between them and other ethnic groups, mostly whites, that has plagued them for at least seven decades.

Economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis found that: “No progress has been made in reducing income and wealth inequalities between black and white households over the past 70 years.” Similar research from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances showed that the median net worth of black households in 2016 was $17,150, while the same statistic at the same time period for white families was $171,000, nearly ten times as high.

Inarguably, more employment-authorized immigration weakens labor markets, and puts downward pressure on wages – the supply and demand law at its most basic. Unchecked immigration also gives cheap, labor-addicted corporations license to under-pay immigrants who need jobs but have limited skills.

In his January 10 Chicago TribuneOp-Ed, “A Major Culprit in the Wage Gap between Blacks and Whites is America’s Immigration Policy,” Frank Morris noted that when the Congressional Black Caucus votes in unison to expand immigration and to authorize more guest worker employment-based visas, they’re rejecting the counsel of earlier black heroes. Morris, drawing in part from Roy Beck’s recently published book, “Back of the Hiring Line,” wrote that during the decades following the Civil War, black leaders like social reformer Frederick Douglass, civil rights champion W.E.B. Du Bois, activist Marcus Garvey and labor unionist A. Philip Randolph who, in 1925, organized and led the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first successful African-American led labor union, all favored restricting immigration to help free enslaved people and their descendants. As Du Bois said, in words that ring as true today as they did then, stopping the importation of cheap labor “on any terms has been the economic salvation of American black labor.”

Not only have blacks in Congress, as well as state and local governments’ black elected officials, turned a deaf ear to historically prominent figures like Douglass, Du Bois, Garvey and Randolph, but they’ve also ignored Coretta Scott King, Martin’s widow who is often referred to as “The First Lady of the Civil Rights Movement.” In 1991, after the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act passed with employer sanctions that penalized hiring illegal immigrants, the Senate began drafting provisions that would weaken those sanctions, and dilute interior enforcement. King and other black community leaders wrote to then-U.S. Sen. Orin Hatch (R- Utah) to urge that he postpone the introduction of his employer sanctions repeal legislation. The group wanted an opportunity to prove to the Senate that a repeal would have a devastating effect on the economic livelihood of low-skilled workers, a disproportionate percentage of whom were African-American and Hispanic. King’s efforts to persuade Hatch were unsuccessful. For more than 30 years, illegal immigrant labor has, just as King feared, severely affected blacks, Hispanics and other minorities, and has denied them an opportunity to move up and into the middle class.

The CBC has abandoned its constituency, choosing to support foreign nationals. Instead of helping struggling blacks, the CBC actively hurts them. The caucus accepts without criticism the current illegal alien border surge which will eventually loosen the labor market when the aliens are paroled with work permits. The caucus votes as a block in favor of immigration-expansion legislation including amnesty for millions, and it promotes paths to citizenship for deferred action and temporary protected status holders. American blacks are excluded from CBC’s progressive agenda which guarantees that, for years to come, the wage gap between African-Americans and whites will remain unchanged.


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.

Black Caucus Ignores Wage Gap Solutions

Throwing Money At Migration Means More Failure

By Joe Guzzardi

Vice President Kamala Harris, doubtlessly growing exasperated by the criticism she’s received for neglecting her Southwest border duties, called on Wall Street chief executive officers to help her sort out immigration problems. The summoned executives came from prominent commercial banks like J P Morgan Chase and Citigroup, as well as industry titans from Microsoft, Chobani, PepsiCo Latin America, Cargill and Airbnb.

In early January, Harris announced more than $1.2 billion in new funding to address, as she so often calls it, the “root causes” of migration to the United States. The concept is to foster more economic opportunity in the Northern Triangle countries of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador to deter illegal immigration. Harris made the announcement during a roundtable with the CEOs. Offering a preview of Harris’ announcement to reporters, a Senior White House representative praised “her leadership, her vision.”

A more complete analysis of the promised funding is that it represents a major commitment by the big businesses, but no money has been invested yet, no jobs have been created, and no one even knows if the subsidy, assuming it ever gets off the ground, will have the promised effect – deterring illegal immigration. A look back at history suggests that Harris’ throw-money-at-the-problem plan is doomed to fail, and colossally.

Not that long ago, in 2015 to be exact, and under exactly the identical circumstances of border surging that included large numbers of unaccompanied minors, the Obama administration proposed a huge investment in the Northern Triangle countries. Then-Vice-President Joe Biden wrote a New York Times op-ed titled “A Plan for Central America” which envisioned “systematic change” that would stabilize neighborhoods to reduce crime, encourage investments and create more effective tax collections among local governments. Biden promised that the Obama administration’s financial support would end “endemic violence and poverty.”

In his op-ed, Biden also compared the Obama administration’s proposed team up with the Alliance for Prosperity to the 1999 Plan Colombia, a failed six-year, $9 billion anti-drug experiment. By 2006, the State Department, then under President George Bush’s direction, shifted its funding to Mexico, and the Merida Initiative with part of its funding designated for Central America. The initiative promised to curtail “the illicit flow of drugs, people, arms, and cash,” a vow that has been broken virtually since the moment the ink dried on the pact.

In 2010, the Central America program was separated from the Merida Initiative, and repackaged as CARI. From 2008 to 2013, the Merida Initiative and CARI received more than $2 billion and $574 million in federal funding, respectively. But CARI did nothing to stem violence or to reduce the migrant surge into the U.S. If anything, the opposite happened. In Honduras and Guatemala, homicide rates climbed steadily as U.S. funding for militarization via CARI began to flow. Honduras sent the largest number of kids to the U.S. border, followed by Guatemala. In 2012, two full years into CARI, there were 7,172 recorded homicides in Honduras, marking the most violent year in the country’s recent history. Murders in Honduras have since declined, but are still an unacceptably high at 3,496 in 2020.

Over the years, the U.S. has poured billions of dollars into the Northern Triangle countries with little to show for the money invested. Thousands of poetic words have been spoken and written like Biden’s and Harris’ about U.S. commitment to help the Northern Triangle nations help themselves. But Harris, the so-called border czar knows, as well as anyone, that with the borders wide open and beckoning, no amount of money or posturing, flowery editorials or public relations-written canned speeches will stop traffickers from bringing drugs and humans north. The National Center for Health Statistics reported that drug overdose deaths in the U.S. during 2020 soared 31 percent to 91,977. Sex trafficking for profit is big business, but prosecutions for those crimes are rare. Through its willful neglect, the Biden and Harris administration encourages trafficking despite its tragic and preventable cost in American lives.

As of early January 2022, the White House has given no indication that it will stop the huge inflow – a record high 1.7 million-plus during 2021 – of mainly poor, unskilled and under-educated migrants. Few fault migrants for wanting to improve their lives. But the unasked and therefore unanswered question is what will happen to education, health care, housing and myriad social challenges if, as appears probable, those waves of migrants continue coming. The latest Census Bureau data indicates that the U.S. has 37 million people that it classifies as living in poverty, and millions of Americans unemployed or underemployed. Struggling Americans are nowhere on the Biden administration’s radar.

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.

Throwing Money At Migration Means More Failure

MLB Lockout Is Billionaires Versus Multimillionaires

By Joe Guzzardi

Major League Baseball’s player lockout had no sooner begun than commissioner Rob Manfred sent a letter to fans attempting to assuage ire about the possibility of another partial season – the sixth in 50 years – or even no season at all.

Fans can read through Manfred’s letter, but cutting through its tedious gobbledygook, the bottom line is that the billionaire owners, who preside over a multibillion-dollar industry, want to keep as much of their fortune as possible. The players, many of them already multi-millionaires, want to earn oodles more even sooner. MLB has at least ten billionaire owners; four of them have a net worth that exceeds $2 billion. The New York Yankees are the wealthiest team; it’s valued at $5.25 billion.

From a list of the 20 richest players that includes the active, the retired and the disgraced, their net worth ranges from a low of $80 million – CC Sabathia – to the highest – Alex Rodriguez – $350 million. In 2021, the average player’s salary was $4.2 million, nearly a two-fold increase since 2003, while the 2019 median household income was $69,000. The minimum MLB salary for an eight-month work schedule is $570,000. Fans have no rooting interest in the confrontation between owners and players; a pox on both their houses is a commonly heard rebuttal to clashes between the billionaires and the millionaires.

Baseball is in trouble, not a news flash, but an indisputable fact that should grow more worrisome to the commissioner, the owners and the players. On the field, a single game illustrates baseball’s woes: the World Series, 1960, game seven, Pittsburgh Pirates against the New York Yankees: a day game, played on grass, that the Pirates won, 10-9. Even though the teams scored 19 runs, and combined for 26 hits, the game wrapped up in a tidy 2:36.

Today’s fans, especially the younger ones that baseball desperately needs as it plods forward, find the games too long and too boring. The average length of nine-inning games in 2021 was a record 3:10, compared to about 2 hours and 30 minutes in the 1970s. Games in the 2021 postseason were even longer. The average length of a nine-inning game was 3 hours and 37 minutes with nine of the 36 games grinding endlessly on four hours or longer.

The major culprit is the number of pitchers used in a game. The 2020 rule which requires that, barring injury, a pitcher must face a minimum of three batters or complete an inning before he can be removed is ineffective. In the 2021 regular season teams used a record 3.4 relief pitchers per game. In the postseason, nearly half the starting pitchers were yanked before the sixth inning which boosted the average number of relievers summoned in a nine-inning game to 4.3. No surprise then that last 30 World Series games have all ended past 11 p.m. EDT. Back in 1960, the Pirates finished off the Yankees at 3:36 p.m.

Today, MLB has more in common with Apple than it does with what was once reverently referred to as the national pastime. Immediately endangered is Spring Training which, in the dead of winter, fans eagerly anticipate – sunny skies, swaying palm trees, green grass and fastballs. Assuming the games are played, bring your wallet. The well-heeled Yankees charge $100 for standing room tickets.

Dinosaur fans remember a happier era when the months leading up to Spring Training were about baseball, not lockouts. No fans had the months between February and April better than Brooklyn Dodgers’ rooters who visited Dodgertown, in Vero Beach, Fla.

In his book, “Dodgertown,” author Mark Langill described how the camp became the fruition of team executive Branch Rickey’s long-time dream to bring his players together in a single, top-notch training facility so that all the Dodgers – regulars and minor leaguers – could be evaluated at the same time. Vero Beach, with its vacant, post-World War II Naval facility, was the perfect place. Dodgertown provided dozens of batting cages, two mechanical pitchers, an electric eye umpire that also measured the velocity of each pitch, a sliding pit and a track coach. Some of those baseball-oriented features were Rickey’s innovations. Off the field, the Dodgers kept their players occupied and happy by providing jukeboxes, shuffleboard, horseshoes, croquet and pinball machines. Food was readily and abundantly available. “Take all you want, but eat all you take,” read the cafeteria sign.

But just as the Dodgers left Brooklyn in 1957 for Los Angeles’ lucre, they abandoned Vero Beach in 2009 for the more profitable Camelback Ranch. The Arizona facility offers tourists more than 150 Dodgers caps for sums that range up to $65.00. Those lordly prices help explain why the Dodgers franchise has $3.6 billion value, and why baseball fans are turned off.

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

MLB Lockout Is Billionaires Versus Multimillionaires MLB Lockout Is Billionaires Versus Multimillionaires

Harry Reid Once Championed Pro-American Immigration Reform

By Joe Guzzardi

On Jan. 12, former Senate Majority leader Harry Reid will lie in state at the Capitol Rotunda, following a Jan. 8 funeral in Nevada. Reid joins a long and growing list for this honor that was once limited to former presidents and military leaders, but now includes ordinary citizens.

Since 2000, the number of deceased Americans who have lain in the Capitol is 13. In the previous two decades, the total honorees was four, including two Capitol police officers killed in the line of duty, Florida Sen. Claude D. Pepper and an unknown soldier from the Vietnam War. Going back further to the 1960s and 1970s, Congress honored only eight Americans, including four presidents. No law, written rule or regulation specifies who may lie in state. Concurrent action by the House and Senate determines who will lie in state in the rotunda, assuming the family approves. The honor is at risk of becoming partisan.

Shortly after Reid’s death, legislators from both sides of the aisle sung the Nevada Democrat’s praises. South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham said that Reid would be in his prayers, that he was “a good man” who fought hard for his causes, and that he will be missed. Chuck Schumer, who holds Reid’s old job in the Senate, said that his friend always “looked out for people.”

Schumer’s praise for his old friend and mentor is more insightful than he might have imagined. Reid once championed meaningful immigration reform that would have benefited Americans, especially blue-collar workers. Eventually, Reid drifted over to the extreme left, and supported illegal immigrant amnesties as well as more employment-based visas.

In 1993, about six years after Nevada voters promoted him from the U.S. House of Representative to the Senate, Reid introduced a far-reaching comprehensive immigration reform bill that Democrats, especially former President Barack Obama and Schumer, would prefer to forget about. As per a press release issued from his office, Reid outlined what he called “the first and only comprehensive immigration reform bill in Congress,” the Immigration Stabilization Act of 1993 (ISA).

The first item of business the press release addressed was to overhaul the nation’s immigration laws and begin “a massive scale-down of immigrants allowed into the country from approximately 800,000 to 300,000.” Legal immigration reduction groups have been lobbying for similar reductions for years. The current 1 million-plus annual lawful permanent residents is an unsustainable level since chain migration eventually converts the initial 1 million immigrants into about 3 million. A Princeton University study found that, on average, each immigrant petitions slightly more than three family members to join him in the U.S.

Another long-sought change reductionists have favored for decades: ending birthright citizenship. Reid wanted clarified that a U.S.-born child to an alien mother who is not a lawful resident should not be considered a U.S. citizen. If ISA were approved, Reid said the incentive for pregnant alien women to enter illegally, often at risk to mother and child, for the purpose of acquiring citizenship for the child and to then receive federal benefits would be eliminated.

Other Reid recommendations have a familiar ring: a “crack down” – Reid’s wording – on illegal immigration, then an estimated 3.3 million, ending asylum fraud along with the “phony” claims that allow unqualified aliens to enter, excluding aliens who cannot financially support themselves without assistance, and beefing up border security.

For a period, too short as things turned out, Reid was committed to rational immigration. In his 1994 Los Angeles Times Op-Ed, Reid scorned his colleagues for their failure to reduce legal immigration, and he urged lawmakers to reject “unfounded” racism charges to act “quickly” to pass ISA. He concluded that the “real injustice to future Americans would be to do nothing [to reduce immigration].”

Reid was a spot-on prognosticator. Congress did nothing, and in the three decades that have passed, the illegal immigrant population has quadrupled from 3 million to nearly 12 million. The border that Reid wanted to reinforce is a horror show as officials predict that 2 million aliens will cross illegally this year.

In his official statement about Reid’s death, President Joe Biden praised him “for his power to do right for the people.” Reid was, Biden concluded, a “giant.” Had Reid stuck to his 1993 immigration wish list, he would have done “right for the people,” and could truly be remembered as a giant. Instead, Reid dropped the ball and – platitudes being heaped on him aside – was just another politician whose views shifted with the Capitol Hill winds.

Joe Guzzardi is a Progressives for Immigration Reform who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org.

Harry Reid Once Championed Pro-American Immigration Reform Harry Reid Once Championed Pro-American Immigration Reform