It’s been said time and time again: The United States is the global leader in science and technology. However, if we want to retain our position at the head of the pack, we need to rapidly rethink some of our immigration policies. Since the advent of the current tech boom in the mid-1990s, U.S. employers have been begging the federal government to subsidize their business activities by increasing their access to cheap, compliant foreign labor.
You read that correctly. High-tech employers are now trying to cut their labor costs using the very same technique that has become infamous in the agricultural, construction and hospitality industries: massive infusions of foreign guest workers.
When former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel reprised the Winston Churchill statement “Never let a good crisis go to waste” while recently referring to this nation’s battle with the coronavirus, he was all but signaling the path forward for this nation’s open borders, mass immigration lobby.
Why not use this crisis as a way to attack both immigration enforcement and recent actions by the Trump administration to ensure that immigrants demonstrate self-sufficiency and not rely on public welfare programs?
Since the end of the Korean War, American policymakers have become less and less concerned about the public health effects associated with mass migration. To a certain extent, that makes sense. In the post-war period, significant parts of the world gained access to clean water, quality health care and medications. With modern tools and techniques keeping the majority of us relatively healthy, one can easily forget that dangerous microbes often accompany people and goods moving across national borders.
Nevertheless, there are thousands of dangerous viruses, bacteria, protozoa and other germs hiding out all over the world. Most of them are spread by contact with infected people, livestock or agricultural produce. And despite modern medicine’s Herculean efforts to control them, the best that science can hope for is to keep them at bay.
Year after year, big agriculture tells us they are facing labor shortages on their farms. Their lobbyists bemoan the lack of available labor and claim that Americans won’t do the work, and those who do are too lazy to stay through the full season. They’re even saying this at a time when 22 million American workers are now unemployed due to the coronavirus crisis.
Big agriculture has access to an unlimited number of foreign guestworkers through the H-2A program, but even that is not enough. They still insist on hiring illegal aliens, who make up as much as 70 percent of our country’s farmhands.
More than a million veterans who served this great nation struggle to make ends meet. Worse yet, tens of thousands of them are living on the streets homeless, and thousands more are constantly at risk of losing their homes. Many of them fail to receive the proper health care they deserve. This tragedy should be a top priority for our nation’s lawmakers. However, too many politicians today seem more concerned about offering handouts to illegal aliens who have no legal right to be in this country than they are about the plight of America’s heroes: Our Veterans.
Americans woke up to dual headlines last Thursday: 4.4 million Americans filed first-time unemployment claims, bringing the five-week job loss total to 26 million, and President Trump signed an Executive Order temporarily halting immigration to the United States.
One headline was true, while the other one wasn’t. Sadly, the epic job losses resulting from the coronavirus crisis continues unabated. And, regrettably, the Executive Order that President Trump signed late Wednesday which, in the president’s words, is intended to “ensure that American workers of all backgrounds will be first in line for jobs as our economy reopens,” does nothing of the kind.
President Trump announced that he would be implementing a temporary pause on certain types of immigration to help the United States recover from COVID-19. And it only took about 14 hours for his detractors to accuse him of exceeding his authority and violating the separation of powers.
New York Attorney General (AG) Letitia James threatened to sue, in order to protect Congress’ power to “write immigration policy.” And Jerrold Nadler and Zoe Lofgren claimed, “Under our Constitution, Congress writes the laws, and the president must enforce them as written. This executive order turns that bedrock principle of separation of powers on its head.”
Imagine a car salesman selling you a Lamborghini and delivering a go-kart instead. That’s what the last week has felt like.
We were thrilled to see President Trump’s tweet saying he would suspend immigration into the country to protect American workers as the Chinese coronavirus ravages the economy. Not only would such a desperately needed pause on immigration be popular with about 80 percent of the American people, it would also stand on strong legal footing. Keep in mind that the Supreme Court reaffirmed the president’s authority to do such a thing in 2018.
Last month, President Biden requested $13.6 billion in emergency funding to deal with record levels of illegal immigration. There is no disputing that the situation at the border constitutes a national emergency, but it is an emergency almost entirely created by the president’s own policies. As such, giving the Biden administration more money, without conditioning it on radically altering the policies that created the emergency, would only exacerbate the border crisis while plunging the nation $13.6 billion deeper into debt.