Seeing a line on the scroll at the bottom on Fox 29 10 p.m. news we wondered whether we’ve seen it correctly. This was that Mayor Eric Adams (NYC) went to El Paso to meet with the mayor of El Paso to discuss the immigrant crisis, keeping in mind that immigrants are persons who are in crisis due to lack of solutions due to various federal governments.
At first the search (using Duck Duck Go) of the meeting above only lead to four items of the first 10 on the first page, but by three days (Jan. 18) there were there were 20 articles using “Mayor Adams visits El Paso”.
In the Politico article, Adams called it a “fact finding mission”, and he was hosted by fellow Democrat Mayor Oscar Leseer of El Paso. He pledged to start a “coalition with mayors facing similar situations”.
Next week at the annual US Conference of Mayors. (Hear that Mayor Kenney?) where he will try to coordinate American mayors to say “How do we respond to this directly?”
He further stated “There should be one (FEMA) to coordinate everything that is happening dealing with migrants and asylum seekers in our country”. He went on to say that the city spent $366 million and received just a total of $10 million from a combination of FEMA and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.
Adams told Fox News that the refugee resettlement, “should be coordinated by our national government, not only done locally by these NGO’s, but it should be done by our national government. That is not happening.”
Others, however, are concerned that Adams is trying to foist his problems on all taxpayers.
Hopefully, we will have a bipartisan effort so that we can have a coherent federal plan to work with the migrants and the cities, rather than dumping “the migrant crisis” on the cities by federal inaction.
US Assisting Child Traffickers Whistleblower Says — Project Veritas has released an interview with a government whistleblower who claims that Biden Administration is knowingly sending children to be used as sex or labor slaves.
The fig leaf is that the trafficker is someone who who will allegedly care for the child, often pretending to be a family member. The child has a note with the name of the person on them for our border authorities to find.
She said 44 children have been sent to just one address alone in Texas. Project Veritas went to several of these addresses and found young children living with multiple unrelated men.
Elon Musk, Twitter’s new chief executive officer, and the firings he immediately called for that included H-1B visa holders, as well as the tech industry’s mass, across-the-board layoffs, raise a three-decade-old question: should the H-1B visa be eliminated, and should U.S. tech workers be put first in line for the white-collar, well-paid jobs?
Musk, who completed his $44 billion Twitter takeover last month, declared that he would end lifetime bans from his platform and tweeted that diverse viewpoints would be welcome. He has a golden opportunity not only to end censorship and restore free speech as he’s promised, but to also hire U.S. tech workers when workforce needs again grow.
Going forward, Musk would have a chance to replace the Twitter employees that he’s fired with U.S. tech workers. The firings – about half the Twitter staff, or around 3,700 employees – are allegedly a cost-cutting measure. He summarily dismissed big earners like CEO Parag Agrawal, $30 million annually; Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal, $18.9 million; Chief Legal Officer Vijaya Gadde, $17 million; and General Counsel Sean Edgett, whose salary is unknown, but likely in the same range as his peers. A class action lawsuit was filed against Twitter in San Francisco federal court claiming that the employees were not given the mandatory 60-day notice prior to the layoffs.
Many of the fired Twitter workers may be in the double-whammy vortex. As H-1B employees, unless they find another job within 60 days or successfully change their immigration status, they must leave the U.S. or risk deportation. H-1B holders who are legally required to leave must depart and not overstay their visas which the federal government clearly identifies as temporary. The U.S. Immigration and Immigration Services estimates that about 8 percent of Twitter’s 7,500 employees, between 625 and 670, have H-1B visas.
Tech and social media are either laying off workers by the thousands or imposing hiring freezes. With Intel’s 20 percent slash, Snapchat’s 20 percent cut and hiring freezes at Amazon and Apple, H-1B holders are on edge. Meta, formerly known as Facebook, cut 11,000 jobs, 13 percent of its staff, after Mark Zuckerberg admitted that his so-called metaverse project was a $15 billion bomb. Meta/Facebook is in a tough spotvis-à-vis its H-1B layoffs. Per the Department of Labor classification, this means 15 percent or more of Meta’s full-time employees are H-1B nonimmigrant workers.
For more than 30 years, Silicon Valley and other employers have falsely claimed that without nonimmigrant H-1B visa employees, their businesses would suffer. Yet now, with widespread tech layoffs that include H-1B holders, admitting 85,000 international workers in 2023, the visa’s annual cap, would further hurt U.S. tech workers who are either displaced and forced to train their replacements or denied interviews. Because H-1B employees are cheaper to hire than U.S. tech graduates, the corporate elite prefer them over more skilled, more well-educated Americans.
The Wall Street Journal hosted a panel discussion that featured two advocates who favor expanding the H-1B program and one critic who urges major reforms. The advocates, David Bier, the Cato Institute’s immigration studies associate director, and Theresa Cardinal Brown, the Bipartisan Policy Center’s managing director of immigration and cross-border policy, argued that the H-1B visa cap should be increased and that their labor market presence makes America a more prosperous place.
The critic, Dr. Ron Hira, Howard University, political science associate professor and Economic Policy Institute research associate, countered that the rigged H-1B system is a transfer-of-wealth scam that makes the employers wealthy winners, and the workers, low-wage losers. Dr. Hira added that employers aren’t required to prove that a U.S. worker shortage exists before hiring an H-1B, that H-1B workers’ wages are set too low, and that the compliance system doesn’t hold employers accountable. “Guest-worker programs are supposed to fill domestic labor shortages. The H-1B program does not fill shortages,” Dr. Hira said.
The Journal debate represents the challenge that H-1B critics face. No matter how many H-1B visa holders lose their jobs, or how economically depressed the tech sector is, the demand for more visas will remain. Pro-immigration media supporters like the Journal, immigration advocacy groups, lawyers, corporate America and the powerful Chamber of Commerce will incessantly lobby Congress for more, more, more H-1B visas.
Ray Marshall, President Jimmy Carter’s Labor Secretary and University of Texas Professor Emeritus, gave a no-frills summary of the H-1B that its advocates should heed: “One of the best con jobs ever done on the American public and political systems…H-1B pays below market rate. If you’ve got H-1B workers, you don’t have to do training or pay good wages.” Musk has an opportunity to set an example for Meta and others to follow: hire U.S. tech workers.
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.
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.
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.
Only a handful of insiders realize the true magnitude of the border crisis and its consequences.
Those in the know include defanged Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents, neutered Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, journalists whose truthful reporting rarely makes national headlines, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and his White House superiors. Otherwise, the dangers that open borders represent are kept tightly under wraps to avoid bad optics. The world, however, knows that accessing the U.S. interior is merely a matter of getting to the border, crossing and beginning the journey – often White House-aided and abetted – to the final destination for those who enter illegally. In President Biden’s eyes, the world is welcome.
In mid-August, for example, CBP caught ten illegal immigrant adults posing as the ubiquitous unaccompanied alien child (UAC). The phony minors, apprehended at Texas’ El Paso Sector, ranged in age from 18 to 26; by law, UACs must not have reached age 18. All were Guatemalans who claimed to be minors to avoid deportation.
Days later, at the Del Rio Valley Sector, agents stopped an 18-wheeler crammed with 150 smuggled aliens that included 17 gang members, one sex offender and one convicted of murder. MS-13 members were among the identified gangsters. This fiscal year, an estimated 130,000 UACs, some self-defined, have entered. The CBP press release on the DRV action concluded, vaguely: “All subjects were processed accordingly.”
The Coalition Against Trafficking Women, Latin American branch, estimates that 60 percentof Latin American children who embark on a U.S.-bound journey, either alone or with smugglers, are captured by cartels, and then forced into pornography or drug trafficking. In addition to enduring a moral nightmare, those migrants who successfully make it to the U.S. interior will have outstanding debts owed to the coyotes and cartels that will take them a lifetime to payoff. To make sure that smuggling accounts are settled, the aliens are forced to wear GPS wristbands so that the cartel can monitor their movements. Cartels are the world’s most powerful criminal organizations and have created the largest form of modern slavery. The New York Times estimated that cartel revenues reached $13 billion this year, up from $500 million in 2018, a 26x increase in fewer than five years.
Over the years, illegal immigration has reached such extraordinarily high levels that it begat more illegal immigration. Decades of porous borders, inadequate interior enforcement and the current welcoming environment have facilitated today’s historic and continuous wave.
In 2018, during interviews in Guatemala’s tiny 17,000 residents-strong Concepción Chiquirichapa, reporters learned that almost everyone has family, or knows someone with family, in the U.S. Think about what that amazing statistic conveys: individuals thousands of miles away from Los Angeles, Chicago and New York, and with few transportation options in their remote villages, have departed for the U.S., confident that they’ll get in, and will remain indefinitely.
But neither unlawfully present parents nor their children who are joining them, trafficked or not, deserve a free pass from the Biden administration. In previous UAC waves, 60 percent of the children were handed over to illegally residing parents. U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen, in the Southern District of Texas, wrote of several instances in which parents “initiated the conspiracy to smuggle minors into the country illegally,” a reference to contracting with traffickers.
Then, Hanen continued, instead of enforcing immigration laws, “DHS completed the criminal conspiracy…by delivering the minors into the custody of the parent living illegally in the United States.” Hanen’s message: Nonenforcement encourages parents to pay coyotes to bring their minor children north. UACs will continue to flock to the border as long as their illegal alien U.S. families can criminally bring their children to the U.S. without concern for their own removal. Judge Hanen’s criminal conspiracy allegation is tough talk, but accurate. And with the entire U.S. a sanctuary nation, nonenforcement’s failures and the fallout are painfully obvious.
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.
Immigration Crisis Should Give GOP Upper Hand But Will They Act?
By Joe Guzzardi
With seven weeks remaining before the 2022 mid-term election, Republicans and Democrats have drawn their battle lines, and staked out what each party considers their opponents’ political vulnerabilities.
Last week, the GOP released what it called a “Commitment to America” that included many oft-made, unfulfilled promises to its base. GOP House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) and Conference Chair Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) vowed to fund border enforcement, end catch-and-release and mandate E-Verify, the online program that confirms whether a newly hired employee is legally authorized to work in the U.S.
President Biden swiftly rebutted. Speaking to the teachers’ union in Philadelphia, Biden called the “Commitment to America” thin gruel, and chided McCarthy for omitting references to issues that, in his view, voters most care about like a woman’s right to choose, Medicare, Social Security, gun violence and LGBT discrimination.
Enforcing immigration laws may help give Republicans a winning hand – border patrol agents have apprehended an estimated 4.9 million illegal immigrants during the 20 months since Biden’s inauguration. The variable in the November election is whether the GOP can unify behind its promises, traditionally a huge problem for Republicans, and press their advantages into a congressional majority against what will be solidly determined, no defectors allowed, Democrats.
Key to the Commitment to America is E-Verify. At first glance, the program should have universal congressional support – no one from either party can intelligently argue that citizens and lawfully present immigrants shouldn’t be protected against illegal immigrant employment. But the donor-base wants illegal immigrant employees, cheaper and more subservient. And because the corporate elites are so influential with U.S. representatives and senators, E-Verify has hit a congressional brick wall for nearly 30 years. Thus, E-Verify has never had the benefit of a full floor vote.
Sadly, the Biden administration has moved dramatically away from E-Verify’s intention. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ October 12, 2021 memo prohibits Immigration and Customs Enforcement from conducting worksite enforcement raids that might turn up employed illegal aliens. Mayorkas’ memo is an administrative subversion of immigration law, and an open invitation for employers, penalty-free, to hire illegal aliens who will also be protected from enforcement consequences. Under existing but ignored law, employed illegal immigrants could be deported.
Despite insistence from immigration advocates that Americans won’t do most of the jobs that aliens are hired to do, the evidence proves the contrary. In 2017, ICE audited an industrial bakery in Chicago which forced the employer, Cloverhill Bakery, to fire 800 illegal aliens. The terminated employees were quickly replaced by mostly black Americans. Similar ICE cases targeted illegal employment at Mississippi chicken plants, at a trailer manufacturer in Texas and a meatpacker in Tennessee. Not only were hundreds of Americans hired to fill the now-vacant jobs, but the government indicted some directly involved managers. The cases’ common denominators were the aliens’ presence in the labor market, a problem that E-Verify would have averted.
The Commitment to America is encouraging, but skeptics wonder if there’s muscle behind it or if it’s more GOP smoke and mirrors. McCarthy, Scalise and Stefanik have what’s generously described as tepid voting records on reducing illegal presence and jobs. In the same illegal presence and jobs category, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell scored a zero. About a week ago on the Senate floor, McConnell delivered a squishy speech about immigration’s importance; his tone didn’t reverberate with the Commitment to America theme.
During the campaigning, certain to be contentious, GOP leaders may have an awakening, and persuade undecided voters that American jobs and sovereignty must be saved. Time is short. At Biden’s current pace of admitting the world – including got-aways – the U.S. could have more than 7 million illegal aliens added to its population by 2024, an unsustainable total that will adversely affect every aspect of Americans’ lives.
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.
Immigration Crisis Should Give GOP Upper Hand But Will They Act?
Bussed Migrants Prove Limits to Inviting the World
by Joe Guzzardi
Emotions are raw; temperatures are heated, and embattled parties are exchanging strong statements. The uproar’s cause: illegal immigrants being sent to sanctuary cities. New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C. mayors Eric Adams, Lori Lightfoot and Muriel Bowser allege that Texas, Florida and Arizona governors – Greg Abbott, Ron DeSantis and Doug Ducey, respectively – are playing politics with migrants’ lives, and that racism motivates their actions.
After calling Abbott a racist, Lightfoot openly questioned the Texas governor’s Christian values. Bowser declared that the migrants’ arrival constituted a public emergency, and asked the White House to summon the National Guard, an ignored request. Fulfilling a promise he made in April and upping the ante in the immigration debate, DeSantis sent two planes with migrants, mostly Venezuelans, to Martha’s Vineyard, an elitist playground. In the spring, the Florida Department of Transportation received DeSantis’ approval to set aside $12 million to fly the aliens to Martha’s Vineyard and Delaware. Abbott sent two busloads to D.C.’s Naval Observatory, Vice President Kamala Harris’ residence.
DeSantis and the other governors counter the mayors’ political grandstanding charges by saying that the financial burden illegal immigrants create should be shared among the states. In the governors’ collective opinions, no destinations are better suited as new homes for aliens than sanctuary cities whose leaders have long avowed their willingness to accept them.
Days after the migrants arrived in Chicago – and the total 500 headcount is miniscule compared to the millions that have crossed into Texas – Lightfoot changed her hospitable tone. She shipped the aliens unannounced to suburban Elk Grove Village. Mayor Craig Johnson was as displeased as Adams, Lightfoot and Bowser with the influx of mostly poor, undereducated and unskilled into his municipality. Johnson asked: “Why are they coming to Elk Grove?”
Johnson’s question is valid. From the moment migrants cross the border, during their resettlement, and indefinitely into the future, taxpayers fund the exorbitant costs.
A new financial analysis from the Federation for American Immigration Reform found that to provide for the 1.3 million illegal aliens that Biden has released into the interior and the 1 million estimated gotaways, taxpayers will be assessed $20.4 billion annually, a sum that will be added to the existing $140 billion that’s allotted each year to the existing, long-term illegal alien population. FAIR estimates that each illegal alien costs American taxpayers $9,232 per year, and further calculates that the $20.4 billion could provide Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits to more than 7 million additional needy families, fund and expand the entire National School Lunch Program, hire more than 315,000 police officers to combat the nation’s escalating crime wave across the country, and hire 330,000 new teachers, which would end America’s long-standing teacher shortage.
The billions of dollars spent on migrants is against a backdrop of unmet needs in American families. A Brandeis University study found that 35 percent of American families, despite working full-time, year-round, do not meet the “basic family needs budget” – the amount needed for rent, food, transportation, medical care and minimal household expenses. For black and Hispanic families, 50 percent cannot afford life’s fundamentals. The Brandeis survey showed that low-income families with children are struggling; more than two-thirds of full-time workers don’t earn enough to make ends meet. Those families would need to earn about $11 more per hour to fully cover basics costs, or about $23,500 in additional annual earnings. Black and Hispanic families would require a $12 hourly income spike, $26,500 annually, to meet the family budget.
Biden campaigned as Scranton Joe, working America’s champion. But as president, Biden has abandoned his commitment to lower- and middle-class families. Instead, Biden has rewarded illegally present foreign nationals with billions of dollars. As a result, Scranton Joe is as unpopular in his hometown as he is nationwide. In Pennsylvania’s 8th District that includes Scranton, Biden’s approval rating is 38 percent, indicative of his failures.
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.
Bussed Migrants Prove Limits to Inviting the World
Sanctuary cities are once again in the headlines. But this time, sanctuary cities, the bane of immigration law enforcement advocates, have a different spin. Since five-time deported illegal immigrant Jose Inez Garcia-Zarate murdered Kate Steinle in July 2015 on Pier 14 in San Francisco, state and city governments have persisted in welcoming illegal aliens and protecting them from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. San Francisco is a sanctuary city in the sanctuary state of California.
Despite a federal immigration detention request to hold Garcia-Zarate so immigration officials could take him into custody, San Francisco authorities freed the seven-time convicted felon just three months before he killed Steinle. Eventually, Garcia-Zarate was acquitted and sentenced to time served on an illegal firearms possession charge.
Between January 2014 and September 2015, the Center for Immigration Studies reported that sanctuary jurisdictions rejected 17,000 ICE detainer requests – 17,000 individuals who should have been deported but remained to potentially pose criminal risk to U.S. citizens. Claiming that migrants are fleeing poverty and persecution, local leaders have been willing to spend their constituents’ taxpayer dollars on affirmative benefits for the newly arrived illegal immigrants.
Suddenly, however, with President Biden and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas opening the Southwest border to foreign nationals from 150 countries and clandestinely flying them to faraway cities, attitudes are less welcoming. New York Mayor Eric Adams said that busing migrants from Texas to mid-town Manhattan, as Gov. Gregg Abbott has done, is “cruel.” About 4,000 unlawfully present migrants have entered New York’s shelter facilities since May, an ”unprecedented surge,” said Adams, who has unsuccessfully called on the federal government to intervene.
Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser has made the same complaints as Adams, labeling the migrant flood “critical,” issuing identical rejected pleas for federal intervention. Since April, Gov. Abbott has sent more than 6,800 illegal immigrants to Washington. Bowser has begged for the National Guard to intervene “to help prevent a prolonged humanitarian crisis in our nation’s capital resulting from the daily arrival of migrants in need of assistance.” McAllen, Texas, Mayor Javier Villalobos mocked Adams and Bowser. Villalobos said: “The city of McAllen was able to deal with thousands of immigrants a day; I think they can handle a few hundred.”
Adams and Bowser should have known that pleading with the feds, especially Mayorkas, would be futile. At the January U.S. Conference of Mayors, Mayorkas tried to sell the assembled mayors on his new, mostly gutted ICE. But the attendees wanted to hear about border enforcement, a subject Mayorkas studiously avoided.
While it may be overly optimistic to hope for a change now that prominent Democratic mayors are experiencing first-hand the fiscal burden and public safety risks that sanctuary policies create, a shift is in the wind.
The mere existence of sanctuary cities is illegal. Local laws that protect illegal immigrants prevent routine cooperation among municipal, state and federal law enforcement agencies. President Obama’s Attorney General Loretta Lynch realized the importance of keeping law enforcement apprised about any individual’s immigration status. Lynch warned sanctuary cities that they would not receive Justice Department funding in the 2017 fiscal year if they did not comply with 8 USC Section 1373, which prohibits any agency from restraining “in any way” the exchange of information among federal, state and local agencies regarding foreign nationals’ immigration status. Despite saber-rattling from Lynch, and then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, funding continued.
With millions of border crossers already released into the U.S. interior, and millions more anticipated during Biden’s remaining two and a half years in office, sanctuary cities will come under increasing pressure to provide for their unlawfully present alien residents, an untenable situation for the already underfunded, overcrowded municipalities.
Biden DHS To Distribute Illegals To Stop Bad Optics
By Joe Guzzardi
Just five months before mid-term elections, the Biden White House is concerned that ugly border optics may cost Democrats both congressional chambers. Border shelters in Texas and Arizona are bulging at the seams. Customs and Border Protection lack other options to address the border crisis and are releasing illegal aliens onto city streets. With this situation, the Department of Homeland Security is preparing, at taxpayer cost, to transport migrants deep into the interior.
The latest DHS plan comes during a record illegal immigrant surge that includes 234,088 aliens in April alone, according to data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Religious and nongovernmental organizations at the border, which typically house illegal immigrants after CBP releases them, are overwhelmed.
In El Paso, for example, CBP recently freed dozens of migrants, penniless non-English speakers, who then sat on street corners. The El Paso Times reported that the city’s resources to help have been depleted. Agents release more than 1,000 immigrants a day despite El Paso only having enough room to house 1,700. Neither the DHS nor any other federal agency contacted El Paso Mayor Oscar Leeser to warn that, because of the border surge, large numbers of aliens were on the way. The Biden administration’s policy is to operate arbitrarily, and let the local communities fend for themselves.
Sources with knowledge of the DHS plan said that taxpayer dollars would be allocated to reroute aliens to shelters around the country. The first city DHS targeted is Los Angeles. Then, future migrants will be sent to Albuquerque, Houston, Dallas and other cities. The effort to relocate migrants involves the Southwest Border Coordination Center, which comprises officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, CBP and other agencies.
Despite the assembled experience that the multiple federal agencies assumably have, their decision to initiate the program in Los Angeles is baffling. No city in the nation is less prepared to accept mostly poor, mostly unskilled illegal immigrants than Los Angeles with its 20 percent poverty rate. The city and Los Angeles County’s populations are, respectively, four million and 10 million. Both the city and county struggle with a homelessness crisis that the aliens will exacerbate. The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority’s latest numbers, which were gathered in 2020 prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, show that the county’s homeless population increased by 12.7 percent to 66,436 over the previous year, while Los Angeles’ homeless population spiked 16.1 percent to 41,290.
Within the general Los Angeles homeless population, a Hispanic subset revealed their dashed hopes about coming to California to find a job, only to eventually be left without shelter. KQED, Northern California’s NPR and PBS member station, spoke with homeless illegal immigrants about their lives post-border crossing. Jobs were lost, illnesses occurred, rents increased to unaffordable levels and connections with family back home grew infrequent. A day laborer, who goes by “Alonso,” said that if conditions in Los Angeles don’t improve, he’ll return to Mexico.
For all the other Alonsos located in California, Albuquerque, Houston and Dallas, Mayorkas is ensuring that their lives will remain unfulfilled. In Albuquerque, the poverty rate is 18 percent, and homelessness is rising, quadrupling since 2013. In Dallas, which has a 22 percent poverty rate, shelters are full every night. And in Houston, with its 21.2 percent poverty rate, homelessness is up 5.8 percent in 2022 in year-over-year counts.
For those who point out that the administration has broken virtually every border and interior enforcement immigration law, and by so doing jeopardized a sovereign America, Biden has the audacity to equate patriots with domestic violent extremists.
Since terrorists with murder on their minds can enter the U.S. effortlessly, Biden’s insult is laden with irony. An alleged ISIS operative, Shihab Ahmed Shihab, already inside the U.S., plotted to smuggle fellow terrorists through the open border. Once safely across, the terrorists planned to surveil former President George W. Bush’s home and his institution to develop an assassination plot. Despite Mayorkas’ claim that the border is secure, the FBI warrant application indicated that Shihab claimed to have smuggled two individuals associated with Hezbollah into the U.S. for a fee of $50,000 each. Shahib, an Iraqi national, had an asylum application pending.
Biden’s immigration agenda, after 18 months as president, includes dismantling immigration law, opening the border and importing poor, limited-skilled individuals, relocating them to communities that can barely keep afloat. As well, the agenda includes disregarding terrorist plots to assassinate former presidents and encouraging fraudulent asylum claims. Little wonder the White House is apprehensive about the upcoming elections.
Biden DHS To Distribute Illegals To Stop Bad Optics
