Category: Guest Authors

Corman Runs For Governor; Josh Shapiro Rejoices

Corman Runs For Governor; Josh Shapiro Rejoices

 By Ryan Shafik

Dynastic, career politician Jake Corman – president pro tempore of the Pennsylvania State Senate – is the latest Republican to toss his hat in the ring for Governor of this great Commonwealth.  Given Corman’s insatiable ambition, his decision to enter the fray isn’t necessarily surprising.  What is shocking is that someone with Corman’s amount of political baggage actually thinks he enhances his party’s potential for victory in 2022. Corman’s arrogance in believing he will “clear the GOP field” (as he is reportedly conveying to GOP power brokers) is breathtaking. Speaking clearly: Jake Corman is the most unelectable candidate in the GOP field, and his candidacy should be considered dead in the water.

Known as “Jake the Snake” among his many detractors and enemies in Pennsylvania politics, Corman is unquestionably a fatally flawed GOP candidate — which is no mean feat given that one of his rivals in the primary is being investigated for his involvement in a possible fatal hit-and-run accident.

Corman Runs For Governor; Josh Shapiro Rejoices

 Having worked in Pennsylvania’s campaign trenches for over 20 years, I can tell you that having a baggage-laden, career politician like Corman as your opponent is the political equivalent of a shooting fish in a barrel for any consultant/strategist with half a brain cell.  No one wants to see Jake Corman become the GOP nominee for governor more than the presumptive Democrat nominee, Attorney General Josh Shapiro.  Let us examine the reasons why: 

1. Corman hails from a geographically weak area.  The State College media market covers less than 9 percent of the state’s total population.  Corman’s home county, Centre, is the largest county in this media market, and it is one he lost against an underfunded, no-name Democrat in his 2018 bid for re-election.  Compounding this problem is the fact that Corman has virtually no name recognition outside his state senate district as confirmed by a recent poll of the 2022 Republican gubernatorial primary race.  In fact, Corman barely attracts a scant 15 percent of GOP voters in his own media market, which he has been highly visible in for 22 plus years.  However, in that same poll, Republican State Senator Doug Mastriano bests him with 25 percent support in Corman’s own media market and doesn’t even represent any of that area in the Senate. 

2. Corman is the product of dynastic politics. His state senate seat was bequeathed to him by his late father, former state senator Doyle Corman.  If there is one thing voters on both sides of the spectrum in Pennsylvania detest –especially Republican primary voters– it’s political dynasties.  Just ask Jeb Bush. This helps explain why in Corman’s own small backyard, he can’t garner more than 15 percent of GOP voters in his bid for governor while Lou Barletta is dominating his own media market with over 51 percent support in that same poll. 

3. Corman is now target numero uno of Pennsylvania’s grassroots conservatives, who are enraged at him for: ushering Act 77 through the legislature thus creating a 50-day stretch of no-excuse-needed mail-in voting, which Trump loyalists believe handed the election to Biden; and vindictively punishing pro-election audit State Senator Doug Mastriano, a hero to many pro-Trump Republicans.  Corman not only booted Mastriano from the Senate GOP caucus, he stripped him of his Harrisburg staff.    

4. The heaviest anchor around Corman’s candidacy is his 22-year anti-taxpayer record of enriching himself at the public’s expense. Indeed, “Jake the Snake” is arguably the most venomous creature in the Harrisburg Swamp. He’s been at the center of every crooked deal to come out of the state capital over the last two decades, and his numbers will collapse faster than his backbone during state budget negotiations with Tom Wolf when this record is exposed.  The lowlights are:  the infamous midnight pay raise of 2005, when legislators snuck into the Capitol during the witching hour to give themselves an unconstitutional mid-term pay raise of 16-34 percent; the Pension Grab of 2001, when Corman and his fellow careerists raised their already generous taxpayer-funded pension by a staggering 50 percent; and the gas tax hike of 2013, which Corman enthusiastically voted for and touts to this day. How politically toxic is the vote making Pennsylvania’s gas tax among the highest in the country? Just ask Tom Corbett.  Tom Wolf pounded Corbett over the head with ads in every media market outside Philly, causing enough Republicans to pull the lever against Tax Hike Tom.  You can bet Josh Shapiro’s team is retrieving those ads from the media archive as you read this.  Eight years ago, I wrote a memo warning Republicans that Tom Corbett’s numbers were fast becoming unrecoverable. However, the GOP establishment hacks ignored reality and stuck with “their guy”, who went on to buck the national Republican wave of 2014 to be the ONLY Incumbent GOP Governor in the country to lose to a Democrat.

You are probably asking, “Why doesn’t Corman understand that his candidacy is mission impossible?” Is he that delusional to think he can survive his horrible record?”

 Well, yes. It’s simple. Corman’s cadre of (inept and greedy) consultants need somebody to pay for their second or third summer beach home.  And this is the dirty little secret the media fails to report during campaign season. Pennsylvania’s establishment consultant class lines up in big statewide races to feed at the trough, often going to great lengths to convince their clients and potential clients “they can be governor, too.” Many do this knowing damn well their candidate stands no chance. But for them, it doesn’t matter as long as the check clears. I understand that strategists and consultants working in campaigns is part of the process.  I do that for a living, as well. But to actively recruit and convince ego-driven, delusional politicians they stand a chance at winning statewide office, when in reality they have the same chance as a one-legged man does at winning an butt-kicking contest, is one of the reasons we have so many subpar candidates in the field.    And therein lies the problem with today’s GOP gubernatorial field.  Many of these candidates with no chance of victory are often coaxed into running by Harrisburg’s grifter class. I know this for a fact, since I have often convinced candidates not to run for office after they met with other firms who were selling false hope of likely electoral success.  

Unfortunately, what is the result of this greedy practice?  The voters are left with fatally flawed candidates, like Jake Corman, who actually believe they, too, can be Governor. And if flawed career politician Jake Corman by some miracle or strange turn of event becomes the GOP nominee in 2022, then you can expect Tom Wolf to hand over the keys to the Governor’s mansion to Attorney General Josh Shapiro.

Ryan Shafik is the principal of Rockwood Strategies, a conservative-free-market affiliated political consulting, communications and research firm in Pennsylvania. He is not associated or affiliated with any 2022 candidates runningfor Governor. RockwoodStrategies.com – rockwoodstrategies@gmail.com

Corman Runs For Governor

Corman Runs For Governor Corman Runs For Governor

Composting Blows Blowing Away Regarding Leaves

Composting Blows Blowing Away Regarding Leaves

By Bob Small

So The New York Crimes, I mean Times, had a long-winded opinion piece entitled “The First Thing We Do Let’s Kill All the Leaf Blowers” by a Margaret Renkl. One of my Swarthmore neighbors, John B, hand-delivered it to me –that’s how they do things in Swarthmore — and insisted I write about it. John is anti Leaf Blowers (hereafter LB).

Now, living in Swarthmore, and Delco, the melodic tones of the gas-powered LB reigns supreme at many hours, which leads to outrage in some quarters, though, unless it’s before 7 a.m., it’s kinda legal.

Composting Blows Blowing Away Regarding Leaves

Now there are not any Pennsylvania State Regulations about Gas LB’s (and here you thought there were Pennsylvania State Regulations about everything), but 15 States, including neighboring states, New Jersey and New York, have municipal regulations on this. These municipalities include Princeton and Southampton.

Now we have never used a LB because we refuse to surrender our leaves to the Borough. Instead, our leaves become mulch for our winter vegetables and other plants, and end up in our chicken coop. The leaves make the ground much richer for nature and, by growing and eating our own fruit, as long as we are still allowed to do this, we feel we may be, in our own small way, disrupting this whole notion of the Global supply chain.

At least we hope so.

A rake has advantages over any LB. First, raking does not affect the environment. It is also this thing they call exercise which many married men try to avoid, and it puts you right out there with nature, rather than beyond it.

Which gets us to lawnmowers. We have neighbors using lawnmowers daily, or paying someone. My question has always been Why! Of all the activities I could find (and did as an adolescent), I find daily mowing much less useful than composting (in my house I’m “King of the Compost Pile”), digging for plants, trees, providing for our chickens, etc. However, if this daily mowing keeps our neighbors off the Swarthmore streets, it’s probably useful.

Let’s end with a quote from a former Eagles Player Ricky Waters “For who, for what”. Though I guess if it’s a choice between watching the Fall 2021 Eagles or mowing, then mowing sounds good.

Composting Blows Blowing Away Regarding Leaves

Build Back Better Bad News For Tech Workers

Build Back Better Bad News For Tech Workers

By Joe Guzzardi

While a disbelieving nation is focused on the endless border crisis, more immigration sleight of hand is ongoing in Washington. Cloaked in Congress-speak, the troubling details of the Build Back Better Act (BBB) are being hidden from a bad-news weary public.

The National Border Patrol Council’s Rio Grande Valley chapter vice president Chris Cabrera told Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) that the widely cited 400,000 “got-aways” represents a significant undercount. The total number of aliens who evaded border patrol detection is, Cabrera said, “at least twice if not three times that number,” as many as 1.2 million illegal immigrants. Add the 1.2 million not tallied to those among the 1.7 million caught and released in fiscal year 2021, and all of a sudden, the U.S. has a new population roughly the equivalent size of Phoenix, the country’s fifth largest city.

The border crisis is public, seen in its full inglorious detail on the nightly news. Congress’ immigration shenanigans occur behind closed doors and are incomprehensible to nonimmigration lawyers. Nevertheless, the open borders and Capitol Hill wrangling have the same goal: a huge, nation-altering immigration increase.

Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough rejected amnesty Plans “A” and “B,” concluding each time that transformative immigration changes don’t belong in budget reconciliation legislation. That should have ended the amnesty discussion. But, undeterred, expansionist Democratic senators have nevertheless stealthily included provisions in BBB that will significantly increase legal immigration and subsequent chain migration. Writing for the Center for Immigration Studies, Robert Law, a former U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services official, noted that pro-expansion advocates have tried to hide the reconciliation bill’s massive immigration increases through “an accounting scam,” commonly known as “visa recapture.”

Every year, the State Department offers 140,000 work visas, 226,000 family-sponsored visas and 50,000 diversity visas to prospective immigrants. The reconciliation bill proposes going all the way back to 1992 to “capture” and reuse unissued visas, and to make them available to potential immigrants. Law wrote that recapturing visas, as the reconciliation bill proposes, violates existing immigration law; in effect, there’s no such thing as an unused visa. Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) wrote in protest to his Independent Vermont colleague Bernie Sanders, and called the recapture provisions “the crown jewel of corporate lobbying.” Breaking immigration law, however, isn’t a roadblock for the Biden administration – witness the border crisis which the president and his Department of Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas created and encourage.

Build Back Better Bad News For Tech Workers

BBB has more destructive provisions aimed at U.S. tech workers which would further enrich cheap labor-addicted employers. Under the proposed legislation, an illegal alien already in the U.S., and with a two-year wait for his Green Card, could, assuming his sponsoring employer pays a $5,000 fee, adjust his immigration status to lawful permanent resident, exempt from annual limits and per-country caps.

About 583,420 H-1B visa holders and their families would jump to the head of the Green Card line. Hundreds of thousands of U.S. tech workers have had their personal and professional careers ruined by callous Big Tech employers who have exploited H-1B visa rules to hire cheaper foreign-born workers while they pass over more qualified Americans.

In his same letter to Sanders, Hagerty summed up how ruinous BBB would be for U.S. tech workers: Those provisions “effectively terminate, for at least 10 years, all numerical limits on the annual allotment of green cards,” allowing “technology companies across America to employ a functionally limitless supply of cheaper foreign labor in place of willing, able, and qualified American workers.”

More than destructive to U.S. tech workers, BBB will create population spikes so dramatic that the U.S. Census Bureau will have to revise dramatically upward its growth projections. Pre-BBB and the open Southwest Border, the Census Bureau projected that U.S. population would grow by 79 million people between 2017-2060, with roughly 90 percent of that growth resulting from Congress’ immigration policies. Americans don’t want more sprawl, more traffic and a less enjoyable quality of life.

A growing number of Americans feel that Biden is too focused, and at their expense, on bettering illegal immigrants’ lives and accommodating the donor class. The $185 trillion BBB bill is a glaring example – vague promises about reaching climate goals, the proverbial vows to create millions of better jobs, affordable childcare availability, and other familiar, but never-kept pledges to improve Americans’ lives.

Immigration increases will change Americans lives, and should be discussed front and center in the Senate Judiciary Committee, not tucked away in the small print of a voluminous 1,684-pages bill that only a scattered handful of Senate aides have even read.

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.

Build Back Better Bad News For Tech Workers

Sgt Hank Bauer In Right Field

Sgt Hank Bauer In Right Field

By Joe Guzzardi 

During the New York Yankees’ unprecedented five consecutive World Series Championships, 1949-1953, manager Casey Stengel had an arsenal of stars and superstars he relied on. Some were icons like Mickey Mantle; others were interchangeable standouts like outfielders Irv Noren and Gene Woodling.

But a key Stengel cog was U.S. Marine Corp Sergeant Henry Albert “Hank” Bauer who survived the World War II battles of Guadalcanal, Guam and Okinawa. During the three encounters, more than 12,000 Americans perished, and thousands more were severely injured. Bauer was awarded two Bronze Stars, two Purple Hearts and a Commendation Medal for sustained acts of bravery and meritorious service.

Bauer’s heroism came despite enduring 24 separate malaria attacks during his four years in the South Pacific. On Guam in 1944, shrapnel from an artillery shell torn open a hole in Bauer’s left thigh. As he was evacuated with his pal Richard C. Goss, Bauer muttered, “There goes my baseball career,” a prediction that proved false. Despite the severity of his wound, Bauer had a long, successful baseball life. More importantly, Bauer lived. Only six of the 64 men in Bauer’s platoon survived the brutal Guam battle. Bauer’s brother Herman, a catcher in the Chicago White Sox minor league system, was less fortunate; on July 12, 1944, Herman was killed in action in France.

Sgt Hank Bauer In Right Field

Bauer always claimed that he never fully understood why in 1942 he enlisted: “I saw the poster, and saw the blue uniform, and all that B.S….I hoped I could take up a trade, pipefitting perhaps, but the only thing I traded was a bat for a rifle.” From his East St. Louis childhood where he was the youngest of nine siblings, Bauer acquired a tough guy-persona. Young Bauer grew up admiring the St. Louis Cardinals Gas House Gang, and learned from a charter Gang member, Enos Slaughter, the importance of playing hard baseball. When pitchers walked Bauer, he ran full speed to first, just like Slaughter. “It’s no fun playing if you don’t make somebody else unhappy,” he told a Time Magazine reporter, “I do everything hard.”

Stengel admired Bauer’s grit. The Yankees manager said: “Too many people judge ballplayers solely by a hundred runs batted in or a .300 batting average. I like to judge my players in other ways, like the guy [Bauer] who happens to do everything right in a tough situation.” During the Yankees’ five-year championship streak, Bauer batted .298 with an OPS over .800. In 1953, Stengel named Bauer the Yankees’ leadoff hitter; his on-base percentage topped .350 for his first 10 full seasons during which time the Bronx Bombers won nine pennants and seven World Series. As the Yankee roster evolved from the pre-war DiMaggio generation to the Mantle era, only Bauer and Berra played in all nine Series. Fans voted Bauer to represent American League as the starting right fielder in the 1952-53-54 All-Star Games.

In 1959, the Yankees traded Bauer and 1956 perfect World Series game hurler Don Larsen to the Kansas City Athletics for future home run champion Roger Maris. Bauer learned about his trade on the radio, and felt that he deserved to hear the disappointing news in person. After his playing days ended, Bauer managed the Athletics, and then moved on to coach the Baltimore Orioles before, in 1962, he took the team’s helm. By 1966 the Orioles, anchored by Brooks Robinson, Frank Robinson and Boog Powell, swept the favored Los Angeles Dodgers in the World Series, with their aces Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale, 4-0. The following year, injuries devastated the Orioles, and their hampered play cost Bauer his job. He moved on briefly to manage the Oakland A’s before retiring to manage his Prairie View, Kan., liquor store. Bauer briefly took up golf, but quit: “Only time I ever hit to right field in my life was on that golf course,” he said.

Despite his reputation as quick to brawl – the most infamous episode involved a free-for-all at New York’s Copacabana night club during a 1957 Billy Martin birthday celebration, an incident which accelerated Bauer’s trade to Kansas City – his teammates and the media loved him. Orioles’ pitcher Milt Pappas recalled that Bauer: “had a raspy voice and scared the hell out of everyone. Underneath he was the nicest guy in the world.”

During his Yankees career, Bauer had the honor to play with several other military veterans: Whitey Ford, Army, Korean War; Yogi Berra, Navy, Purple Heart; Jerry Coleman, Marine Corp pilot, World War II and Korea, Distinguished Flying Cross (2); Phil Rizzuto, Navy, World War II; Joe DiMaggio, Army Air Forces, World War II, and Major Ralph Houk, Army Ranger, World War II, Purple Heart.

At age 84, his valor on America’s behalf esteemed and his diamond accomplishments admired by millions, Bauer died from lung cancer. Before passing, Bauer often said proudly: “The Yankee logo is like a Harvard degree.”

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

Sgt Hank Bauer In Right Field

Sgt Hank Bauer In Right Field

Right To Bear Fruit Established In Maine

Right To Bear Fruit Established In Maine

By Bob Small

I had almost forgotten my previous days with a community garden in Philly (she was a blonde, too) when my wife (#3 but who’s counting) decided that now that we’re retired we can start a vegetable garden, along with some fruit trees. Borough Swarthmore fought us on the fruit trees but went down to defeat.

This brings us to Nov. 2 in the state of Maine, a secessionist state –from Massachusetts in 1820– which recently passed Question 3 by 60 percent of the vote. Briefly, this gives individuals “the right to produce, harvest, and consume their own food.”

State Rep William Faulkingham (R-136) give a rather long-winded support of this. Jumping ahead 25 to 30 years into the future, could we see our government creating roadblocks and restrictions to the peoples right to food?

Will Monsanto own all the seeds?

Right To Bear Fruit Established In Maine

Opoosition ranged from valid concerns to well….

While Katie Hansberry (Maine State Director of the Humane Society) brought up the possibility of lifestock cruelty unlimited by animal cruelty laws, Janelle D. Tirrell (Maine Veterinary Medical Association) queried “Does this mean I can keep a cow in my Portland Apartment? Can I slaughter pigs in my front yard?”

While Maine chose to constitutionalize these rights, only a handful of other states have these rights, Pennsylvania not being one. Thus cities and municipalities can try and determine what you can and cannot grow, Of course you can always appeal this but who has the time and money to take the long way around just to grow apples and tomatoes, etc.

Further, Pennsylvania does not grant a Constitutional right to hunt or fish, as half our states do, but the state does sell fishing ($22,90) and hunting ($20.97) licenses.

I seem to remember that the Pennsylvania Legislature unofficially closed on the first day of hunting season.

You can also continue to purchase raw milk in Pennsylvania — until big Farma prevents that.

So, in Pennsylvania, you may grow and consume your own fruit and vegetables
but you do this at your own risk of legal ramifications.

And Monsanto may be watching.

Right To Bear Fruit Established In Maine

Job Turnaround Hopes Realistic?

Job Turnaround Hopes Realistic?

By Joe Guzzardi

The October Bureau of Labor Statistics report showed that the economy boomed forward with a higher than anticipated 531,000 new jobs, a good sign for workers across the board. Wall Street analysts had predicted that 450,000 jobs would be added.

Private payrolls jumped 604,000 while the unemployment rate fell to 4.6 percent from 4.8 percent. BLS also revised up the total jobs for August and September by 235,000 in part because it recalculated seasonal factors. The economy registered its strongest growth in the leisure and hospitality sectors, 164,000, followed by manufacturing, 60,000, then transportation, 54,000, construction, 44,000, and healthcare, 37,000.

Job Turnaround Hopes Realistic

No doubt the labor market and Biden administration benefited from the coronavirus case decline, and employers’ renewed push to hire. Also contributing to the surprisingly strong October report was the post-Labor Day pandemic unemployment programs’ expiration that included the $300 federal bonus and extended eligibility from the traditional 26 weeks to 79 weeks.

In October, some demographic sectors benefited greatly, specifically female workers. Women represent about 57 percent of October’s job gains, 370,000, a dramatic shift from September when men gained all of that month’s new jobs, but more than 300,000 women left the labor force.

More female workers could soon be re-entering the labor pool. Jasmine Tucker, the National Women’s Law Center director, said that women are enjoying a “turnaround.” Tucker points to a return to in-person learning, and an hourly wage increase for hospitality and leisure workers from $17.12 per hour in October 2020 to $19.04 per hour only one year later. But, a hitch: Tucker estimates that, assuming October’s vigorous pace continues, it would take about eight months for the economy to gain back the nearly five million jobs lost during the pandemic.

Several demographic groups suffered an unemployment spike between September and October, including white women who went from 3.7 percent to 3.9 percent; Asian women, 3.4 percent to 4.4 percent, and Hispanics, 5.6 percent to 5.7 percent. Nearly one woman in every three, or 32.6 percent, who were unemployed in October had been out of work for six months or longer.

On behalf of women who successfully landed jobs in October, and want to keep their positions as well as in the best interests of women still seeking employment, the NWLC should immediately demand that the Biden administration stop handing out employment permits indiscriminately to border crashers, and to other illegal immigrants who have reached the interior. An estimated 160,000 illegal aliensnow in the interior have received parole, an immigration status that includes work permission. Most are low-skilled, and will compete head-to-head with workers, women and otherwise, in leisure and other occupations that don’t require more than a high-school degree.

American minorities, those seeking jobs and those already employed are especially vulnerable to an immigration-driven expanded, cheap labor pool. Numerous academic studies, including many done by liberal-leaning, pro-immigration analysts, found conclusively that immigrant labor, when readily available, depresses U.S. wages.

No analyst fits the “liberal-leaning, pro-immigrant” label better than New York Timesop-ed columnist and Graduate Center of the City University of New York economics professor Paul Krugman. Showing a mastery of Econ 101 and other economic principals he learned while earning MA and PhD degrees at MIT, Krugman wrote: “Immigration reduces the wages of domestic workers who compete with immigrants. That’s just supply and demand: we’re talking about large increases in the number of low-skill workers relative to other inputs into production, so it’s inevitable that this means a fall in wages.”

Since Krugman’s conclusion is inarguable, advocacy organizations like the NWLC, founded in the 1970s, comprised of lawyers and activists who seek justice for their constituency, need to step up immediately to oppose the Biden administration’s employment authorization giveaway. The border invasion shows no sign of slowing. Detentions and arrests at America’s Southwest border hit an all-time high in 2021. More than 1.7 million migrants were detained at the border, a significant percentage of which will eventually become work authorized, and expand the labor market – terrible news for U.S. workers.

Biden could reverse the open borders course he’s chosen to pursue. But he prefers to welcome the world, give corporate employers a helping hand, and keep Americans struggling to recover from the job-killer pandemic. Future BLS reports may indicate a strong economy, but the important variable is that new jobs go to citizens and lawfully present residents, not aliens who knowingly violated U.S. laws.

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.

Job Turnaround Hopes Realistic?

Fentanyl Deaths Reach Record High

Fentanyl Deaths Reach Record High

By Joe Guzzardi

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that last year in the United States more than 93,000 people died of drug overdoses, the largest number of drug-related deaths ever confirmed in a single year. In 2020, led by fentanyl-related fatalities, opioid deaths accounted for 75 percent of all overdose fatalities.

Unlike other industries that suffered business losses during the COVID-19 pandemic, drug runners enjoyed a booming, near-insatiable trade. One reason, explained the National Institutes of Health’s director Dr. Nora Volkow, is that since fentanyl is easily produced, and only a small hit creates an addictive high, it’s effortless to smuggle across the border. Unchecked fentanyl trafficking has had, in addition to soaring death rates, other adverse consequences. Among the impacts that Dr. Volkow identified are “decreased access to addiction treatment, increased social and economic stressors, and overburdened health departments….” These harmful variables, Dr. Volkow concluded, “collided in 2020 and were associated with a tragic rise in overdose deaths.”

Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that experts consider up to 100 times stronger than morphine and 50 times stronger than heroin, two other drugs that, when used for other-than medical applications, are addictive and deadly. Most commonly, fentanyl flows from China, through Mexico and its cartels, then proceeds northward on routes that lead to the San Diego border, finally arriving at the U.S. interior.

Fentanyl Deaths Reach Record High

Another popular method of pure fentanyl distribution is directly from Chinese laboratories to U.S. customers via the mail, packed in small, hard-to-detect packages. In January 2020, the Drug Enforcement Agency wrote that Mexican transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) were “producing increased quantities of fentanyl and illicit fentanyl-containing tablets, with some TCOs using increasingly sophisticated clandestine laboratories and processing methods.” One kilogram of pure Chinese fentanyl, about a $3,300 to $5,000 wholesale cost, can be converted into a diluted powder sold at a $300,000 street value. The further fentanyl travels from its border entry point, the steeper the retail value rises.

America’s battle against fentanyl is the latest, most damaging lost War on Drugsthat the U.S. has suffered since 1970 when President Richard M. Nixon signed the Controlled Substances Act. In the psychedelic era, drugs were, President Nixon said, “Public Enemy No. 1.” Determined to roust drugs out of U.S. society, President Nixon followed up when he created the Drug Enforcement Agency in 1973. At the agency’s outset, DEA employed 1,470 special agents and functioned with a budget of under $75 million a year. Today, the agency has nearly 5,000 agents and an annual budget of more than $2 billion. Despite spending $1 trillion over the last five decades, the War on Drugs has failed cataclysmically. The War will continue to be unsuccessful as long as the Biden administration’s open borders persist. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, acting with President Biden’s tacit endorsement, unashamedly refuses to do his sworn duty to protect the nation against invasion, and has thereby paved the way for drug contraband, and the deaths that go together with it, to continue unchecked.

CBP cannot cope with the unprecedented U.S. invasion, 200,000+ illegal immigrants in July and August, and seize fentanyl and other addictive drugs at the same time. The Center for Immigration Studies’ Andrew Arthur, a retired immigration judge who reported from Texas’ Del Rio sector, noted that CBP is stretched to “the breaking point.” Administratively attending to surging aliens takes time away from the agents’ principal task of stopping illegal entry. About 40 percent of CBP agents are “off the line,” meaning that they’re performing nonborder security-related tasks like migrant child care, feeding unaccompanied minors and providing comfort to weary travelers.

Biden and his White House have proactively chosen to allow cartels and other criminals to ply their multibillion-dollar enterprise, a larger cash cow than Walmart, safe from the federal government’s intervention. To the Biden administration, last year’s 93,000 American deaths are an inconvenient truth that won’t stop it from pursuing its open border, end-America agenda.

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.

Fentanyl Deaths Reach Record High

Citizens Wonder Does Biden Care?

Citizens Wonder Does Biden Care?

By Joe Guzzardi

When future historians look back at Joe Biden’s presidency, they may identify October 2021 as the point in time when his agenda became clear to all: subvert and destroy sovereign America.

Unmistakable and undeniable signs of Biden’s goal to irreversibly and forever recreate America in the image his puppeteers – former President Barack Obama; current Director of the Domestic Policy Council, Susan Rice, and Interim Obama Foundation president Valerie Jarrett, to name a few of many – mapped out for him.

During his presidential campaign and since his inauguration, Biden has shown few if any signs that he cares about America or Americans. Early on, Biden disregarded the border surges, waved in about 37,000 mostly unvettedAfghan evacuees, with more on the way. Today, with a large illegal alien caravan bowling over Mexican enforcement personnel on their way to Texas, not a soul in the White House, the cabinet or those among Biden’s confidants has indicated concern about the blatant ongoing immigration law violations.

Citizens Wonder Does Biden Care?

During October, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas busied himself with protecting the illegal immigrants en route and those already in the interior. Mayorkas’ memorandums made immigration law enforcement impossible. On October 12, Mayorkas ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to adopt a hands-off policy regarding illegal aliens at workplaces. Illegal alien employees may have displaced U.S. workers or through their presence hindered American workers from successfully obtaining employment. In his memo, “Guidelines for the Enforcement of Civil Immigration Law,” the only categories of alien that DHS, ICE or CBP might target are national security or public safety threats.

Mayorkas also created what DHS refers to as “protected areas,” locations where illegally present aliens may gather, but will now be off-limits for ICE and CBP. Protected areas include but aren’t limited to churches, colleges, parades, demonstrations, rallies, social or medical services locations, vocational or trade schools, and children’s playgrounds.

As if the DHS commitment to shielding 11 to 20 million illegal immigrants (or more) isn’t worrisome enough and deeply discouraging to citizens and to legally present aliens and backlogged foreign nationals following the correct immigration procedures, an October 28 Wall Street Journal story proved how over-the-top the Biden administration is vis-à-vis aiding and abetting unlawful presence.

The Journal wrote that the Biden administration’s departments of Justice, Health and Human Services and DHS are in internal discussions to reward illegal immigrants separated during the Trump administration at the rate of $450,000 per individual. On average, each family’s demands total about $3.4 million. The proposed settlement sum is in response to the American Civil Liberties Union’s lawsuit brought on behalf of parents and children who allegedly at the government’s hand suffered potentially irreversible psychological damage when they were separated at the Southwest border. Noteworthy: the multimillion-dollar recompense to aliens who voluntarily, willingly and knowingly broke U.S. laws would exceed the $2 million payouts made to 9/11 victims. And, incomprehensibly, illegal aliens are treated much more generously than military war widows and widowers. The nation’s defenders, killed in the line of duty, receive a comparative pittance, a one-time $100,000 death gratuity.

Biden’s expansive treatment toward and condonement of illegal immigrants invites more of the same. In fiscal year 2021, border apprehensions reached a record high 1.7 million. The open border also has been a financial goldmine for drug and human traffickers, criminal enterprises that the federal government purportedly condemns. But given its refusal to deter the illicit activity, the government actually is endorsing illegal activity. Assuming Biden can complete his term, he has three years left in his presidency to turn his attention to bettering Americans’ lives.

Search as Americans might for clues that the Biden administration may soon elevate U.S. citizens to the same status aliens enjoy within the White House, there’s no indication a policy shift is on the way.

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.

Citizens Wonder Does Biden Care?

Citizens Wonder Does Biden Care?

Immigration Mayorkas-Style

Immigration Mayorkas-Style

By Joe Guzzardi

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has instituted immigration policies that make the 2021 United States the least secure it’s been in years. In the process of ignoring enforcement, Mayorkas is breaking immigration laws that previous Congresses have passed, and earlier presidents have signed.

In his Oct. 12 policy memo distributed to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Mayorkas revealed his latest in a long line of assaults on federal laws that include proactively encouraging mass illegal immigration at the southern border and gutting interior enforcement. Then, in late October, Mayorkas released yet another memo that neuters CBP and ICE. His so-called “guidance” bars immigration officials from entering “protected areas,” a vague category that could mean anywhere. Mayorkas’ reasoning is that ICE, by its mere presence, must not threaten aliens with possible deportation. The reality is, however, that illegal immigrants not suspected of criminal activity have effectively a zero chance of deportation.

A senior DHS official revealed that of the nearly 2 million migrants Homeland Security and Border Patrol encountered in FY2021, a historic high, more than 1.5 million crossed after President Biden’s inauguration and after his dramatic abandonment of the Trump administration’s immigration and border security guidelines. The report’s total excludes about 400,000 “got-aways” that have also joined the general interior population. As for the record-high totals, Mayorkas dismissed them as “nothing new.”

Immigration Mayorkas-Style

The 2 million illegal immigrants and the aliens who preceded them benefited from excellent timing. In September, Mayorkas announced that DHS would no longer pursue the 11 million illegally present aliens unless they had violent criminal histories or posed national security threats. Mayorkas’ excuse for his criminal neglect is the same impossible-to-confirm one the Obama administration fell back on: “limited resources.”

Mayorkas’ October bulletins, his latest anti-enforcement shoes to drop that represent a de facto amnesty, proclaimed that DHS would end workplace onsite actions which are specifically intended to remove illegal alien employees from their jobs. Then, Mayorkas deceptively added that DHS “has a critical role to ensure our nation’s workplaces comply with our laws,” and that his agency would not “tolerate unscrupulous employers who exploit unauthorized workers….” Under Mayorkas’ direction, DHS has given no indication that the agency is intent on complying with U.S. immigration laws at the workplace or anywhere else.

Unmistakably, Mayorkas is in direct violation of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, signed by President Ronald Reagan after approved by a Congress that included then-Delaware Sen. Joe Biden, which unambiguously forbids and identifies as a criminal act illegal immigrant hiring. Congress, motivated by a two-fold desire to cut off the jobs magnet that lures illegal immigrants north and to protect American workers, overwhelmingly passed IRCA.

With a mere memo, Mayorkas wiped out IRCA, and took another big step forward toward facilitating the displacement of American workers. Hiring illegal immigrants is a crime, but under Mayorkas, employers get off scot-free. Employers who hire unlawfully present workers will escape punishment unless they have engaged in “abusive and exploitative labor practices.” The penalty under U.S. law for employing an individual not authorized to legally work in the U.S. ranges up to $16,000 per alien, and up to ten years in prison.

With the 20,000-personnel-strong ICE mostly gutted, and its 400 worldwide offices limited in their operational scope, Mayorkas has put Americans’ safety in jeopardy. During 2020, on an average day, ICE seized 4,000 pounds of narcotics, managed 3.3 million immigration cases, issued 335 detainers, arrested 87 criminals, made 284 administrative arrests, seized $4.93 million in illicit currency and assets, conducted 509 removals and deported 12 gang members.

With violent crime spiking in 2021, police officers leaving their jobs and now ICE all but dismantled, the Biden-Mayorkas tandem has put law-abiding citizens more in harm’s way than at any time in the past, and for no apparent reason other than to pursue their dangerous political agenda.

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.

Immigration Mayorkas-Style

Immigration Mayorkas-Style

Above-The-Law Facebook Abetting Border Invasion

Above-The-Law Facebook Abetting Border Invasion

By Joe Guzzardi 

Facebook, the tech giant famous for censoring posts that promote political views opposite to its perspective, recently admitted that its users are aiding and abetting illegal immigration.

Responding to a letter sent by Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, Facebook acknowledged it allows online users to share information that advises how to immigrate illegally and, alternatively, how to hire human traffickers to smuggle aliens into the U.S., and then apply for asylum. Shocked by Facebook’s candid confession to helping aliens to criminally beat the system, Brnovich wrote a letter to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland demanding that the Justice Department open a full investigation into Facebook to find a way to “stop its active encouragement and facilitation of illegal entry.”

Brnovich’s indignant letter continued: “Facebook’s policy of allowing posts promoting human smuggling and illegal entry into the U.S. to regularly reach its billions of users seriously undermines the rule of law. The company is a direct facilitator, and thus exacerbates, the catastrophe occurring at Arizona’s southern border.”

Above-The-Law Facebook Abetting Border Invasion

The odds that Garland will investigate Facebook are zero. Because Facebook has shown a blatant willingness to barefacedly break immigration laws, CEO Mark Zuckerberg, et al consider themselves above the law, and know that the feds won’t lift a finger to interfere with their agenda, no matter how brazen.

For example, in mid-October, DOJ caught the social media titan reserving jobs for and then hiring foreign-born H-1B visa workers. In December 2020, the Immigrant and Employee Rights Section (IER) in DOJ’s Civil Rights Division filed a complaint against Facebook with the Office of the Chief Administrative Hearing Officer. DOJ alleged that Facebook refused to recruit – and therefore could not hire – skilled U.S. tech workers. The investigation began in 2017 when then-President Donald Trump’s “Buy American and Hire American” Executive Order, mandating that American worker protections be prioritized, was in effect.

In its complaint, IER asserted that for positions it reserved for those temporary visa holders, no advertisement appeared on Facebook’s careers website, no online applications were accepted, and candidates had to physically submit snail mail applications – not email – to the company, an unusual procedure for a major corporation that rose to fame and fortune through the Internet.

But, in what the Center for Immigration Studies’ Andrew Arthur, a former Counsel on the House Judiciary Committee and a retired immigration judge, identified as “the crux” of the DOJ’s case, IER alleged that “even when U.S. workers do apply, Facebook will not consider them for the advertised positions,” but rather the company “fills these positions exclusively with temporary visa holders.” The DOJ concluded: “Simply put, Facebook reserves these positions for temporary visa holders.”

Facebook’s deliberate subversion of the H-1B’s original intent – to complement the domestic labor force when no other American employee can be found – denied qualified U.S. tech workers coveted white-collar jobs. Facebook deprived an estimated 2,600 U.S. workers a fair shot at professional jobs that, DOJ said in its filing, averaged an annual salary of $156,000.

Instead, Facebook hired workers who obtained H-1B and other overseas visas in 2018 and 2019. Despite Facebook’s egregious and illegal offense, it settled the DOJ lawsuit for a token, slap on the wrist $14 million. Kristen Clarke, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division’s head, concluded: “Facebook is not above the law.”

Clarke’s claims aside, to Facebook, whose 2020 earnings were $21.2 billion and whose available cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities were $61.95 billion as of December 31, 2020, $14 million is pocket change, a sum likely dismissed by the company’s chief executives as the cost of doing business.

Although the DOJ exposed Facebook’s bag of dirty, anti-American worker tricks, the H-1B program will continue without meaningful reform, at least during the current administration. Zuckerberg, his Forward.us lobbying arm, and other tech giants like Google, Twitter and Amazon are huge donors to the Democratic Party. In politics, nothing is truer than the old phrase, “Money talks.”

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.

Above-The-Law Facebook Abetting Border Invasion

Above-The-Law Facebook Abetting Border Invasion