Category: Immigration

Create A Catastrophe By The Numbers

By Joe Guzzardi

850,000 visitors who overstayed their visas and remained in the country in 2022. Included in visa overstays are tourists, H-1Bs, J-1s, and F-1s as well as assorted other visa categories of which dozens are State Department-approved.

More executive branch overreach: the Biden administration has expanded its migrant program to accept up to 522,000 asylum seekers into the U.S. per year. In January the president announced he would let up to 360,000 asylum seekers into the country annually, provided they apply through the CBP One phone app. That program has since been expanded from 1,000 appointments per day to 1,450, meaning up to another 162,000 migrants could be ushered into the U.S. In Biden’s view, these are legal immigrants even though the vehicle he created that allows them to enter, the CBP app, has not been congressionally approved and is illegal. Meanwhile, the CBP app entrants will be using their work authorized status to displace low-skilled black, Hispanic and other diverse Americans from the job market.

What’s certain is that the border surgers’ and visa overstay totals, whatever they may be, represent record levels of illegal immigration that’s Biden’s unlawful agenda. Neither Biden nor DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas have the authority to authorize releasing aliens, or as happens in most cases, to grant them parole with work authorization. Despite the cooked-books style of revised DHS accounting, Southwest border encounters are still roughly four times the level at which President Obama’s DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson said constituted a crisis. Federal law requires that all these illegal aliens be detained throughout their asylum proceedings, but most are being released. Immigration lawyers call CPB’s subversion aiding and abetting illegal immigration a federal felony subject to fines and imprisonment.  

The fall-out from Biden’s lawless immigration agenda is well underway. Every day, an estimated 1,000 needy migrantsarrive in New York. The city, by its own admission, doesn’t have adequate housing or food to properly care for them. Tent cities abound. Mayor Eric Adams is pleading for federal assistance. Other big city mayors in Chicago and Washington D.C.  also begged for funding to cope with the migrant overflow. In Massachusetts the alien emergency is so dire that Governor Maura Healey and Lieutenant Governor Kim Driscoll have implored residents to share their homes with aliens. Their desperate refrain: “Become a sponsor family…. Have an additional family be a part of your family.” Taxpayers are subsidizing illegal aliens most every move once they’ve crossed the border. One estimate puts the aggregate cost to date at $20.5 billion./p>

With 18 months to go in Biden’s presidency that will include a lame duck session when any immigration outrage is possible, the nation’s intake of illegal immigrants could approach ten million, roughly the size of Los Angeles Country. Remember too that legal immigration continues on autopilot, and brings in annually more than one million lawful permanent residents with lifetime valid work permission. Those new LPRs can petition their immediate and non-nuclear family members, a total that Princeton University conservatively calculates as three persons per new immigrants. Today’s one million LPR’s is tomorrows three million new U.S. residents. Chain migration drives most U.S. population increases, and arriving migrants may be pregnant and could eventually grow his existing family.

From 1990 to today, the U. S. grew by 82 million people, and the nation is on a reckless course to match or exceed that unsustainable pattern. In 2022, all immigrant classifications included, the nation added 6.9 million people—the state of Indiana’s population. Those that entered legally, 1.1 million, may have job and English language skills. Illegal immigrants, however, are poor, unskilled, and will be dependent on affirmative government assistance programs. They’ll need the basics—housing, medical care, education, all of which will be taxpayer provided.

Absorbing the new arrivals will adversely alter Americans’ quality of life. The American Farmland Trust reported that over the last 20 years, the U.S. has lost more than 11 million acres of farmland to development to accommodate the nation’s soaring population. Housing hasn’t kept up with immigration-driven population growth, and prices have spiked. Over the past two decades, immigrants currently account for about 33 percent of all U.S. household growth, and have been a critical factor in the housing market’s recent boom. Blue collar workers and citizens aspired to own their first homes have been most adversely affected.

Unquestionably, new immigrants arrive in the U.S. to become consumers; their intention to buy goods and services is the main reason corporate America is so welcoming. But immigrants will also consume natural resources, most importantly water. The U.S., beset by relentless drought, is drying up, especially in the nation’s Western states, and rain isn’t falling fast enough to offset increased water consumption.  When water supplies are limited, and more people consuming the essential resource, shortages will get acute. Ask the 40 million residents of the seven states that rely on the Colorado River for water what their feelings are about more and more immigrant water consumers lowering the reservoirs.

A final, important note:The White House’s hell-bent-for-leather welcome-the-world immigration agenda is unarguably a disaster for sovereign America. The media coverup is nearly as criminal and corrupt as Biden’s governance. America’s future is in your hands—you the voters. When Congress returns after Labor Day, the election 2024 cycle will begin in earnest. As you evaluate the White House, Senate and House of Representative candidates, focus on whether the incumbent has stepped up in an effort to protect the American nation or supported and encouraged Biden as illegal immigrants overwhelm the country. Immigration is the most critical issue on the ballot. Fight back with the most important tool you have—your vote.

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

Create A Catastrophe By The Numbers Create A Catastrophe By The Numbers

Everything Isn’t Enough For Immigration Expansionists

By Joe Guzzardi

Imagine if White House officials, the Chamber of Commerce, the establishment media, corporate America and ethnic identity advocacy groups agreed to an immigration roundtable. Then, further imagine that the moderator asked three questions.

The first question: “Given that fiscal year 2022 ended with a record 2.4 million migrant encounters exclusive of 599,000 known ‘gotaways,’ but including 238,000 in September alone, how many more migrants should be admitted before enforcement begins?”

Second: “Assuming Congress passes amnesty for every unlawfully present alien, would you agree to stop or at least pause in your support for unlimited immigration?” Finally: “Research indicates that loose borders harm mostly black Americans in terms of depressed wages and lost job opportunities. Immigration also provides higher incomes and profits for businesses while redistributing wealth from the native poor to the native rich. Do those findings cause you to question your immigration advocacy?”

A decade ago, advocacy groups agreed to participate in such a discussion; the hypothetical others weren’t present. No matter how the moderator pressed for answers to questions about how many immigrants were too many, no specific response was forthcoming.

The moderator prefaced his questions by acknowledging that most legal and illegal immigrants are hard-working individuals who want better lives for their families and that, with the exception of having broken civil law by being in the U.S. without permission, most aliens are law abiding.

For their part, the pro-immigration debaters insisted that family reunification remain unchanged and that employment-based immigration continue indefinitely. And while vaguely concurring that some numerical limits should be set, none of the participants was willing to set a fixed total. Either speaking on behalf of their group or expressing a personal opinion, the participants refused to discuss, even hypothetically, what the maximum number of immigrants should be or what might represent permissible enforcement regulations. Advocates repeatedly stressed what they perceived as immigration law’s “inhumanity,” but at the same time wouldn’t specifically define why open borders should be perceived as humane. In summary, the open borders coalition demanded unlimited immigration, but rejected border or interior enforcement as quid pro quos.

Ten years later, the Biden administration has rewarded immigration advocates with a clearcut victory. Their immigration wish list, identified a decade ago, has come true beyond their wildest imaginations. While Congress hasn’t passed an amnesty per se, interior enforcement is gutted, making removal unlikely for most illegal immigrants. Moreover, many of the millions of migrants have been granted parole, a misused and abused immigration status that includes work authorization. Not precisely an employment-based visa, parole nevertheless effectively provides the same affirmative immigration benefit – legal access to U.S. jobs.

Going beyond complying with advocates’ wish list, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has diluted the citizenship test. Long used as the basic guideline for identifying which among the recently arrived lawful permanent residents qualify for coveted naturalization, the standards have been dramatically loosened. USCIS director Ur M. Jaddou said that, under certain circumstances, the exam can be bypassed. This represents how the agency “is removing barriers to naturalization…” Jaddou’s reasoning: the public is “better served” by “eliminating questions and language barriers that no longer have practical utility and were redundant.”

At first glance, the Biden administration through its various immigration violations, which some dismiss as merely loosening inconvenient laws, is an overt attempt to swell the Democratic voter base, especially among Hispanics. But with porous borders having pushed Hispanic voters away, the inescapable conclusion is that the administration’s primary goal is to cancel, by any and all possible means, sovereign America.

Imagine if White House officials, the Chamber of Commerce, the establishment media, corporate America and ethnic identity advocacy groups agreed to an immigration roundtable. Then, further imagine that the moderator asked three questions.

The first question: “Given that fiscal year 2022 ended with a record 2.4 million migrant encounters exclusive of 599,000 known ‘gotaways,’ but including 238,000 in September alone, how many more migrants should be admitted before enforcement begins?”

Second: “Assuming Congress passes amnesty for every unlawfully present alien, would you agree to stop or at least pause in your support for unlimited immigration?” Finally: “Research indicates that loose borders harm mostly black Americans in terms of depressed wages and lost job opportunities. Immigration also provides higher incomes and profits for businesses while redistributing wealth from the native poor to the native rich. Do those findings cause you to question your immigration advocacy?”

A decade ago, advocacy groups agreed to participate in such a discussion; the hypothetical others weren’t present. No matter how the moderator pressed for answers to questions about how many immigrants were too many, no specific response was forthcoming.

The moderator prefaced his questions by acknowledging that most legal and illegal immigrants are hard-working individuals who want better lives for their families and that, with the exception of having broken civil law by being in the U.S. without permission, most aliens are law abiding.

For their part, the pro-immigration debaters insisted that family reunification remain unchanged and that employment-based immigration continue indefinitely. And while vaguely concurring that some numerical limits should be set, none of the participants was willing to set a fixed total. Either speaking on behalf of their group or expressing a personal opinion, the participants refused to discuss, even hypothetically, what the maximum number of immigrants should be or what might represent permissible enforcement regulations. Advocates repeatedly stressed what they perceived as immigration law’s “inhumanity,” but at the same time wouldn’t specifically define why open borders should be perceived as humane. In summary, the open borders coalition demanded unlimited immigration, but rejected border or interior enforcement as quid pro quos.

Ten years later, the Biden administration has rewarded immigration advocates with a clearcut victory. Their immigration wish list, identified a decade ago, has come true beyond their wildest imaginations. While Congress hasn’t passed an amnesty per se, interior enforcement is gutted, making removal unlikely for most illegal immigrants. Moreover, many of the millions of migrants have been granted parole, a misused and abused immigration status that includes work authorization. Not precisely an employment-based visa, parole nevertheless effectively provides the same affirmative immigration benefit – legal access to U.S. jobs.

Going beyond complying with advocates’ wish list, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has diluted the citizenship test. Long used as the basic guideline for identifying which among the recently arrived lawful permanent residents qualify for coveted naturalization, the standards have been dramatically loosened. USCIS director Ur M. Jaddou said that, under certain circumstances, the exam can be bypassed. This represents how the agency “is removing barriers to naturalization…” Jaddou’s reasoning: the public is “better served” by “eliminating questions and language barriers that no longer have practical utility and were redundant.”

At first glance, the Biden administration through its various immigration violations, which some dismiss as merely loosening inconvenient laws, is an overt attempt to swell the Democratic voter base, especially among Hispanics. But with porous borders having pushed Hispanic voters away, the inescapable conclusion is that the administration’s primary goal is to cancel, by any and all possible means, sovereign America.

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Joe Guzzardi is a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist who writes about immigration and related social issues. Joe joined Progressives for Immigration Reform in 2018 as an analyst after a ten-year career directing media relations for Californians for Population Stabilization, where he also was a Senior Writing Fellow. A native Californian, Joe now lives in Pennsylvania. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org.