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.
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.
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.
California has gone off the fiscal cliff. The coronavirus crisis nudged the state over the precipice, but the state got right up to the very edge all by itself. According to projections by the state’s Department of Finance, California is facing a budget shortfall of $53.4 billion, which represents a staggering 37 percent of its $147.8 billion budget.
California, like many state and local governments, is looking for an infusion of cash from the federal government, which itself is accruing mind-numbing amounts of new debt. California likely falls under the heading of “too big to fail,” and its fiscal implosion would create an economic black hole that would suck in residents of the other 49 states.
The Supreme Court recently ruled in favor of President Obama’s executive quasi-amnesty — Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). In essence, Chief Justice Roberts joined the liberal justices, determining that the Trump administration’s decision to rescind DACA supposedly did not offer sufficient explanation. As Justice Thomas pointed out, this effectively binds President Trump to an unlawful Obama policy. However, the court simultaneously ruled that the president can still rescind DACA again, but with a more comprehensive explanation. And the president stated that he intends to do just that.
But regardless of what ultimately happens on the DACA front, it is clear that the program is a bad policy that rewards illegal migration, flouts the rule of law, and is unjust towards American citizens.
President Biden should have seen this coming months ago, when he began describing his plans for a mass amnesty coupled with removal of all of the successful impediments to illegal immigration put in place by the Trump administration.
As Biden’s campaign rhetoric zeroed in on a radical immigration agenda last year, caravans began forming in Latin America and apprehensions of illegal migrants began to explode.
The Biden administration recently announced that it will cancel Title 42 as of May 23, based on an assessment by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that COVID-19 no longer poses a critical public health threat to the American public. Title 42 was invoked by the Trump administration in March 2020, allowing Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to quickly return migrants apprehended after illegally crossing the southern border to Mexico, to check the spread of the virus in the United States.
As it continues to ignore the wholesale breach of our nation’s borders, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) just announced the launch of “Uniting for Ukraine,” a historic effort to welcome 100,000 Ukrainians into the U.S. through various admission pathways—most prominently through humanitarian parole.
The full details have yet to be announced, but early indications are that this program will be yet another example of the Biden administration usurping congressional authority through an expansive and illegal use of humanitarian parole.