The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is one of the few institutions in Washington nowadays that is not poisoned by petty partisan bickering. The CBO is nonpartisan and has managed to stay that way. It does not take positions on important policy matters; rather it analyzes data, presents facts and leaves it up to Congress to decide how to use that information.
True to form, a new CBO analysis, “The Foreign-Born Population and Its Effects on the U.S. Economy and the Federal Budget — An Overview,” presents an easy-to-digest picture of the impact of current U.S. immigration policies on the economy. It’s not a pretty one.
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.
Check out what Preston wrote for the Daily Caller.
House Democrats recently voted to strip the president of one of the most important tools at his disposal to protect America from foreign threats: the ability to suspend travel to the United States. The Democrats voted 233-183 to pass the NO BAN Act. Had this bill been law in early 2020, President Trump would have been unable to ban travel from China and Europe, which saved American lives according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).
Under current law, the president can react in real time to national security threats by restricting the entry of aliens under the authority laid out in Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act.
Should American citizens lose representation in Congress and lose out on billions of dollars in federal funding to their communities, and have that representation and funding awarded to people who are illegally present in the United States?
In a more rational time, the answer to that question would be obvious. But we’re not living in rational times. So President Donald Trump’s memorandum, signed on Tuesday, which attempts to at least minimize the harmful effect of including people who are here illegally in the Census—for the purpose of reapportioning congressional representation—was predictably met with howls of protest and lawsuits filed.
Check out what Preston wrote for the Daily Caller:
Foreign guest worker programs and outsourcing are two heads of the same monster decimating the working class and blue collar workers — the same people that propelled Donald Trump to victory in 2016. These policies harm Americans by robbing them of the opportunity to earn a fair wage at a decent job. This reality underscores the importance of President Trump’s recent executive orderthat protects these workers by mandating that all federal agencies focus on hiring citizens for federal contracts, among other measures.
The order is a direct reaction to the news that the federally-owned Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) planned to export as much as 20 percent of their work overseas while slashing 120 American jobs, with plans to cut another 100. This sort of action would be cause for uproar at a private company. At a government-owned corporation, it is outrageous. The TVA is a large employer across parts of the rural South, a region that lags behind the nation in economic development, where the company provides electricity and jobs for residents.
During the last big wave of unaccompanied alien minors (UAMs) in 2019, a Border Patrol agent said something to me that shook me to my core. He said that he was “sick and tired of having to administer rape kits to nine-year olds.”
President Joe Biden has done just about everything he can do to eliminate any vestiges of border and immigration enforcement (although he still may have a few tricks left up his sleeve). But the Holy Grail of full amnesty and a pathway to citizenship for just about every illegal alien in the United States is now tantalizingly just beyond the reach of the president and his allies in Congress. More specifically, an unelected parliamentarian is the only thing that stands between the Democratic leadership’s dream of a nation without borders or limits on immigration.
In a Jan. 22 speech, President Joe Biden not-so-boldly declared, “There’s nothing we can do to change the trajectory of the pandemic in the next several months.”
Biden was selling himself short. On at least one front, America’s southern border, the administration has moved to elevate, not flatten, the COVID-19 infection curve.
In an effort to build stronger relations with Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries, the Biden administration recently announced that it would spent $310 million in the region to help address the so-called “root-causes” of illegal migration. While this figure may look impressive on paper, it does not effectively address the Biden Border Crisis that is negatively affecting countries in the region. Officials from this region continue to denounce the Biden administration’s immigration approach, and so it must put a halt to its border crisis before relations become even more fractured.