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?
When news recently broke that the Montgomery County, MD police department was selecting an illegal alien to accompany them in “ride alongs,” it set off quite a kerfuffle among local police. But it’s not until you dig a little further into the article that you learn that in addition to being in the country illegally, this unidentified Clarksburg, Md. resident also has an active federal arrest warrant against him – for failing to show up in immigration court.
Ringing in the New Year with a bang, nearly 200 swamp-dwellers on Capitol Hill wrote a letter to the Trump administration begging for more foreign workers.
Both political parties deserve blame for perpetuating an immigration system that favors special interest groups over hardworking American taxpayers. However, no branch of government has done more to create and bolster a dysfunctional immigration system than the federal judiciary – which is ostensibly free of partisan politics.
Since the chaos along our southern border peaked last May, there has been a precipitous decline in the flow of Central American economic migrants posing as asylum seekers entering the country illegally. Construction of additional border fencing and stepped up enforcement by Mexico at its own southern border have certainly played a significant role in alleviating the crisis, but it is another program implemented by the Trump administration that has had the greatest impact.
The Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), first rolled out in January 2019, require migrants who want to seek asylum in the United States to wait in Mexico pending their immigration court hearing in the U.S.
On March 10, the United States confirmed that there are now over 1,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19, commonly known as the coronavirus.
On March 10, the United States confirmed that there are now over 1,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19, commonly known as the coronavirus. Multiple members of Congress announced they were remaining home to self-quarantine. Separately, the administration may force hundreds of thousands of federal employees to work from home. President Trump declared the virus a national emergency and cities across the country closed public places and banned large gatherings of people to stem the spread of the virus.
This is all to say that the United States is starting to take the coronavirus very seriously. This is not a partisan issue – Democrats and Republicans both claim to understand the severity of this global outbreak now present in 120 countries.
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.