As 2019 began, newly empaneled Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi vowed, “There’s not going to be any wall money,” referring to legislation needed to fund the government.
Pelosi’s Democratic counterpart in the Senate, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, was even clearer about Democratic leadership’s view of the border wall. “Democrats are against the wall,” Schumer stated with uncharacteristic brevity. Thankfully, the president still managed to secure nearly 100 miles of wall construction and border fencing over the last three years by using Department of Defense money dedicated to related purposes.
As 2019 began, newly empaneled Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi vowed, “There’s not going to be any wall money,” referring to legislation needed to fund the government.
Pelosi’s Democratic counterpart in the Senate, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, was even clearer about Democratic leadership’s view of the border wall. “Democrats are against the wall,” Schumer stated with uncharacteristic brevity. Thankfully, the president still managed to secure nearly 100 miles of wall construction and border fencing over the last three years by using Department of Defense money dedicated to related purposes.
For the seventh month in a row, apprehensions of illegal aliens along America’s southwest border dropped, a trend that six months ago would have been unthinkable. Illegal alien apprehensions for December dipped to roughly 40,000, a far cry from the 144,000 illegal aliens who were detained trying to enter their way into the U.S. in May. Apprehensions have been falling ever since.
Catch and release, a phenomenon that has haunted administrations since George W. Bush was in office and contributed to the surge of migrants arriving at the southern border, is nearly a thing of the past. So what gives?
How important is it to you to see rising wages and more opportunities for American workers?
Many Americans hear that the economy is booming, unemployment is at all-time low and that it’s an employee’s market. Our job market is the tightest it has been in decades.
So why would we ruin these gains by bringing in thousands of cheap guest workers?
It’s no secret that the Social Security program faces a very real threat of running out of money. Thanks to impressive advancements in the medical world, the ratio of workers to retirees is now decreasing too quickly, and the future availability of retirement funds for millions of Americans is in serious doubt. Internal agency assessments predict that the program’s trust fund reserves will be completely depleted by 2034 unless significant reforms are enacted before then.
Of course, many open-border advocates use this as an opportunity to call for more mass-immigration, including amnesty for millions of illegal aliens, to immediately boost the number of workers in the United States.
Only in the stagnant swamps of Washington, DC, could a public policy with the word “temporary” in its title gain a sense of permanence, but that is exactly what has happened to Temporary Protected Status (TPS).
TPS was a benevolent policy enacted in 1990 to provide temporary safe haven to those who were visiting or temporarily living in the United States – such as tourists or students – when civil strife or a natural disaster suddenly struck back home, making their immediate return either very difficult or dangerous.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics recently reported that the nationwide unemployment rate stood at 7.9 percent – double what it was in February before the COVID-19 crisis hit our shores. Stay-at-home orders, government-mandated shutdowns, and delayed reopening of state and local economies continues to derail the ability of our country to recover from the economic and human impact of COVID-19. Worse still, millions of Americans remain unemployed, particularly in the service sector of our economy.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was created in response to the attacks of 9/11. Among its critical responsibilities is to secure the nation’s borders, enforce its immigration laws and protect the interests of Americans and migrants. But none of those priorities is likely to be achieved under the leadership of Alejandro Mayorkas, the man President-elect Joe Biden has nominated to serve as the next DHS secretary.
The times they will be changing, come January 20. Joe Biden will bring a change in style, a change in tone and a change in temperament when he assumes office next month. And like any new president, he will bring a change in policies. Perhaps none will be more notable than his handling of immigration policy.
For the past four years, Donald Trump has approached immigration policy from the standpoint that, like any other public policy, its primary purpose was to serve the greater good of the American people. In pursuit of that objective, his administration made good faith efforts to secure our borders, cut down on asylum and other sorts of fraud, end abuses in guest worker programs that undermine the interests of U.S. workers (especially after the pandemic struck) and to ensure that people who immigrate legally have the wherewithal to be self-sufficient.
Candidate Joe Biden was harshly critical of Donald Trump’s handling of immigration policy and border enforcement. He was even critical and apologetic about the Obama administration’s record on immigration, in which he served as vice president, even though President Obama’s supposed toughness on immigration was vastly hyped.