Cagle World

President Biden’s eagerness to welcome millions of global illegal migrants is unlimited. Not only are people from every corner of the world welcome to come to and settle in the United States at taxpayer expense, but now Biden wants to issue each migrant official government identification cards.

With quasi-official status available, mostly poor, unskilled, non-English speaking illegal immigrants will be more willing than ever to pay criminal cartel smugglers for their dangerous and often deadly northbound journeys.

The pilot program, overseen by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, will be called the ICE Secure Docket Card program. Today’s ICE agency is not the traditional one which protected U.S. citizens from the dangers that illegal immigrants potentially pose to the community. Rather, Biden and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ ICE have gutted interior enforcement. They also successfully ended expedited removal, the procedure by which DHS can remove, without a formal procedure, an alien who has entered illegally, or has sought entry without proper documents or through fraud. DHS authority has been an essential part of immigration law for more than a quarter of a century.

If approved, the new ID card will feature a photograph, biographic identifiers and what ICE calls “cutting-edge security features to the mutual benefit of the government and noncitizens.” Since “aliens,” a word used throughout immigration law, is forbidden in the Biden administration’s nomenclature, “noncitizens” or “undocumented” are used in its place. But with the ICE ID card, “undocumented” will also become passé. Illegal immigrants will not only have documentation, but official, federally approved and issued credentials. More than 1 million illegal immigrants have been released into the interior since Biden’s inauguration, each and every one of them potential ID card holders.

Brandon Judd, Border Patrol Council President, said that the cards won’t help immigration officials, but will, along with giving coyotes another magnet to lure their naïve clients into their web, allow illegal immigrants to report to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service to assist in processing their employment authorization documents.

ICE’s defense of its card – that it will provide “mutual benefit to the government and the noncitizens” – lacked tangibles, and is patently transparent. No benefits to the government were specified, but the benefits to the aliens are obvious. They immediately go from “undocumented” to fully documented, at least in the eyes of institutions that will benefit from recognizing the cards – most federal, state and municipal governments, commercial banks, mortgage lenders, landlords, some employers and others sympathetic to illegal immigration.

The ICE representative who spoke to the media about the ID card spun it in the most positive light. Illegal immigrants, the representative claimed, could use the card to check in and schedule reporting dates with ICE offices, and immigration court hearing dates. But the conclusion that the card will assist in scheduling immigration court hearings is a stretch. The Department of Justice’s fact sheet found that only about 49 percent of illegally present aliens show up for their hearings. With or without an ID card, that statistic is unlikely to change. And should illegal immigrants appear, and ordered for removal, that doesn’t guarantee that they’ll depart. With the ID card, they’re more likely than ever to remain.

Critics have concluded that, despite the risks to the nation that it would bring, the Biden administration’s ultimate goal is eliminating existing immigration laws. The ID card is the latest example. Retired career border patrol officer and Center for Immigration Studies board member Kent Lundgren explained why immigration laws exist – to protect Americans and legal immigrants. Those protections fall into four major categories: 1) public health, 2) public safety, 3) national security and 4) jobs and wages.

Biden, his cabinet, his administration and his advisors have ignored, at sovereign America’s risk, the core reasons why previous congresses have passed, and former presidents have codified, immigration laws.

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Copyright 2022 Joe Guzzardi, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Joe Guzzardi is a Progressives for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at [email protected].

For number crunchers, July’s second week offered eyepopping data.

To begin with, the consumer price index shot up to 9.1 percent year-over-year, the highest spike in four decades. Truth be told, consumers may be taking a bigger than 9.1 percent hit. The consumer price index is a controversial index which many economists insist is manipulated to reflect fewer alarming price increases and, conversely, a stronger GDP. Taken together, those two variables, massaged favorably, help to keep a lid on investor panic, and to underpay on cost-of-living increases for Social Security recipients.

Since time immemorial, the consumer price index was calculated based on a fixed market basket of goods. But in the 1990s, the Bureau of Labor Statistics introduced what it identified as geometric weighing – substituting lower-priced, lower-quality goods in the basket, while excluding more expensive, but still everyday items.

Most blue-collar, working Americans consider the consumer price index a government gimmick that purposely excludes their day-to-day necessities: energy up 41.6 percent, gas up 60 percent, eggs up 33 percent, and public transportation up 23.7 percent. A truer indicator of consumer pain showed up in the producer wholesale price index which hit 11.3 percent.

Inflation, which makes Americans poorer with each passing day, has an immediate and tangible effect on consumers’ psyches. But another report issued in early July is, taken over the long-term, more disturbing.

Inflation has its peaks and valleys, but the prediction by the United Nations that the global population will reach 8.5 billion in 2030 and 9.7 billion in 2050 represents an ongoing, and perhaps insurmountable, challenge. By the end of the century, the U.N. estimates that there will be 10.4 billion people on the planet. Today, the world’s population is just a tick under 8 billion, and has grown at an unsustainable rate.

Not until around 1800 did the world’s population first reach 1 billion. But, only 130 years later in 1930, the second billion was reached, and the third billion in 1960, another 30 years later. Then, global population exploded. The fourth billion arrived 15 years later in 1974, and the fifth billion only 13 years after that. During the 20th century alone, the world’s population grew from 1.65 billion to 6 billion. For comparison, in 1970, there were roughly half as many people in the world as there are now. Every year, about 83 million people are added to the global population.

Eight nations will account for most of the growth between now and 2050: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and the United Republic of Tanzania. India is expected to surpass China as the world’s most populous country as soon as next year.

Those countries are thousands of miles away, and their difficulties unfathomable to most Americans, but U.S. population also is climbing at an unsustainable rate. The nation’s population is about 332 million now, but will reach 424 million in 2100, about 25 percent more people than live in the U.S. today. The consequences of too many people are grave, both in terms of more difficult human interaction in overcrowded surroundings, and lasting ecological damage to dwindling natural resources.

Ironically, the U.N. released its frightening population projections at about the same time that Elon Musk, claiming the U.S. faces an “underpopulation crisis,” pleaded for an increase in births. “A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far,” said Musk, who cited himself as a would-be role model. One of his love interests, Shivon Zilis, gave birth to twins this summer, bringing Musk’s total offspring to nine. To Musk, replacement level fertility, normally considered 2.1 children per woman, is an outdated notion.

Unfortunately, Musk’s message to promote a have-more-children agenda, via his huge social media following, reaches more people than the communications of stabilization advocates. Census Bureau data reflects a net gain of one person – births and international migrant arrivals minus deaths – in the U.S. every 26 seconds, far too many to protect the nation’s already crumbling, overcrowded infrastructure and its imperiled ecosystems.

So please, don’t listen to Musk.

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Copyright 2022 Joe Guzzardi, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Joe Guzzardi is a Progressives for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at [email protected].

In 1963, an All-Star game was played that few fans watched, and 59 years later, nobody remembers.

The game, comprised exclusively of Latino players from the American and National Leagues, took place at the New York Giants’ historic Polo Grounds – the last game played at Coogan’s Bluff. The exhibition game, played before 14,235 fans, was a charity event to benefit a new Latin American Hall of Fame.

The Polo Grounds, temporary home to the New York Mets during their first two seasons in 1962 and 1963, had showcased some of baseball’s greatest players – 373-game winning pitcher Christie Mathewson, 511 home run slugger Mel Ott, and Willie Mays, the “Say Hey Kid.” Baseball’s most dramatic moment, Bobby Thompson’s 1951 “Shot Heard ‘Round the World,” thrilled Polo Grounds’ bugs.

Nearly six decades ago, on that warm and sunny October 13th day, a week after the Los Angeles Dodgers swept the New York Yankees in the World Series, the lineups were filled with Latin American and Caribbean nations’ players – Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Panama and Mexico. Black or multiracial, they endured the same bigotry as African Americans.

Among them were future Hall of Famers Juan Marichal, Orlando Cepeda, Roberto Clemente and Luis Aparicio. Others honored included a Minnesota Twins’ future three-time batting champion Tony Oliva, and his teammates MVP Zoilo Versalles and Vic Power. There was also San Francisco Giants star outfielder and future manager Felipe Alou, the Washington Senators’ Minnie Minoso, and the New York Yankees’ Hector Lopez, coming off his fourth straight World Series appearance.

Unlike the 2022 All-Star Game, the Latinos played their game in obscurity – no television, no media hoopla and no promotional advertisement. Three of Latin music’s biggest talents, however, performed on field before the game – bandleaders Tito Puente and Tito Rodriguez and Cuban bombshell singer La Lupe.

For the Latin stars, the game was emotionally charged. Marichal, the “Dominican Dandy,” remembered: “There was a lot of emotion among all the players, and you could tell the fans were excited about it, too.” Manny Mota, a Dominican and Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder then in his second major league season, stressed how proud the players were to represent their countries – “prestige and pride” were his words.

For all its historical importance, the game was a snoozer. The National League, who had won the official 1963 All-Star Game in Cleveland, pulled away by the ninth inning, 5-0. Alou, Mota, the St. Louis Cardinals’ shortstop Julian Javier, and the Pirates’ Alvin O’Neal McBean contributed the winning RBIs. Alou’s single came off the Twin’s losing pitcher, the Cuban Pedro Ramos.

Giants ace Marichal, a 25-game winner in 1963, hurled four innings of shutout ball, allowing just two hits, no walks and fanning six. But the win went to McBean, who followed Marichal to the mound with four shutout innings of his own.

After the game, the players lined up in the clubhouse to collect their $175 stipend, a far cry from what today’s All-Star game participants receive. While not paid in folding green, the 2022 All-Stars get six free tickets to the game and to the Home Run Derby, free first-class airfare and hotel, the daily $117.50 MLB meal stipend, and a swag bag. Don’t forget that the crème de la crème ASG players have negotiated into their contract’s bonuses for up to $500,000 just for being chosen.

But at least three of the Latin players had the last laugh. Cepeda, Clemente and Power were such unfamiliar faces that after getting paid the first time, they went to the back of the line, and unrecognized, collected a second time. Said Cepeda, “The guy never realized he paid us twice.”

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Copyright 2022 Joe Guzzardi, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Joe Guzzardi is a Society for American Baseball Research and Internet Baseball Writers’ Association member. Contact him at [email protected].

No sooner had Texas Sen. John Cornyn finished taking bows for delivering 15 Republican votes to pass a bipartisan gun safety bill than he began talking up amnesty.

Cornyn, a Judiciary Committee member, was overheard promoting amnesty with fellow senators and immigration advocates Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.). Cornyn to Padilla: “First guns, now immigration,” meaning amnesty. Very quickly, however, Cornyn backed off, calling his comment a “joke.” Attempting to cover his tracks, Cornyn said, “The Democrats and their allies in the media really can’t take a joke.”

Nevertheless, the take-away among Republicans is if Cornyn was so quick to cave on the second amendment, and deliver a major legislative victory for the opposition Democrats, more tent-folding, perhaps on amnesty, may not be far away. Because of the pride he took at cooperating with Democrats, Cornyn was roundly booed at the Texas GOP convention.

Skeptics wonder about Cornyn’s immigration and amnesty credibility. Raising doubts regarding Cornyn’s duplicity and providing validity to his amnesty remark is his chummy relationship with Padilla, the former California Secretary of State who Gov. Gavin Newsom named to replace Kamala Harris as U.S. senator. The son of a cook and a house cleaner who migrated to the U.S. from Mexico, Padilla is an avowed immigration expansionist who pledged to work on behalf of aliens to obtain citizenship. Padilla’s self-admitted mission is to make immigration reform “as bold as we can make it.”

The Padilla-Cornyn coziness includes having worked together successfully on a bill which will speed up the admission process by which Afghan interpreters and translators who assisted U.S. troops can enter the U.S. The odd couple also joined up to write a transportation bill seeking to use relief funds for natural disaster cleanup on roads, trails, bridges and transit systems. For true immigration enforcement advocates, Padilla should represent the enemy.

If Cornyn studied immigration history, he’d know that official amnesties, passed by Congress and signed by the sitting president, only encourage more illegal immigration. The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act granted amnesty to about 2.7 million unlawfully present aliens, and promised to resolve a wide range of immigration problems like hiring aliens, and resolving agriculture labor shortages. Today, 36 years later, about 15.5 million illegal immigrants reside in the U.S., one million of them arrived during Biden’s first year in office, and immigration-related issues are more vexing than in 1986.

Immigration reform in 1986 was a colossal failure, yet amnesty is always a primary congressional goal.

Unless Cornyn is living in a vacuum, he must know that under Biden, amnesty is constantly ongoing, although through executive fiat. Thousands of migrants released into the interior have received parole, an immigration benefit that allows aliens to secure work permits. Biden has abused parole – normally issued on a temporary basis to individuals to assist in cases of urgent, humanitarian need.

Under Biden, Temporary Protected Status protections have been granted to or extended for Afghans, Burmese, Cameroonians, Haitians, Somalis, South Sudanese, Ukrainians, Venezuelans and Yemenis. In the aggregate, the Temporary Protected Status population under Biden increased by several hundred thousand foreign nationals. All will receive work permits, and few will ever return home.

At a minimum, whether he was joking or not, Cornyn’s reference to amnesty demonstrated extremely poor judgment. Open borders and illegal immigration have spun out of control under the Democratic White House and Congress. Because of open borders, fentanyl and human trafficking have reached epic proportions, and Americans are deeply concerned about the nation’s future, and overwhelmingly oppose amnesty.

Cornyn’s next re-election bid comes in 2026, enough time for him to wise up to what his constituents’ priorities are. To Texans, many of whose counties declared the border crisis an invasion, amnesty is no joking matter.

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Copyright 2022 Joe Guzzardi, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Joe Guzzardi is a Progressives for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at [email protected].

In the mid-19th century, composer John Philip Sousa was one of America’s biggest “base ball bugs,” as fans were then called.

In his autobiography, “Marching Along,” Sousa, born in 1854, described the joy base ball (as newspapers dubbed the sport until the late 1800s) had imparted to him since way back to the Civil War. Abner Doubleday, the sport’s mythical inventor, was a Union general in the war who fought at the decisive Battle of Gettysburg in 1863.

Throughout the war, when soldiers on either side weren’t marching or engaged in battle, they played baseball to break up camp life’s monotony. Commanders and army doctors encouraged baseball believing that it kept the soldiers fit, healthy and out of trouble. While soldiers frequently took part in foot races, wrestling and boxing matches, and occasionally even cricket or football, baseball was the most popular of all competitive sports in both army camps. Historians noted that baseball came of age during the Civil War, and entered mainstream American culture during those years.

As a Washington, D.C. youth, Sousa watched the game evolve from its earliest days through the Dead Ball era that showcased baseball’s first inductees: Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson and Honus Wagner. Starting in 1857, the 21-run endpoint was eliminated, with games instead ending after nine innings. Foreshadowing modern-day baseball, other rule changes were introduced, including called strikes — previously, strikes were only the result of missed swings. Also, cricket-style flat bats were banned, and a white line marked the boundary between fair and foul territory; the umpire no longer had to guess where the ball landed.

Sousa was more than a fan. Through his years as a bandmaster, Sousa often pitched in games which pitted his band members against local nines. Eventually, his band grew large enough that intra-squad games between the brass and woodwind sections were played. Whenever the opportunity arose to promote the band in front of a large audience, Sousa, often called “The American March King,” would pitch an inning or two. His band members referred to Sousa as “Ace,” and he pitched until age 62.

In the February 1909 issue of “Baseball Magazine,” Sousa, in his essay titled “The Greatest Game in the World,” wrote effusively about playing the American Guards on Independence Day, 1900 at the Paris, France, Exposition Universelle, the World’s Fair. “What,” asked Sousa, “could have been more appropriate for two American organizations in a foreign land to do [play baseball] on the glorious Fourth?” The All-American game that Sousa loved was one of the first baseball games played in Europe.

At the behest of Baseball Commissioner Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, and to celebrate the National League’s 50th anniversary, Sousa in 1925 wrote “The National Game” that combined his two greatest passions, baseball and marches. The original performances featured four baseball bat solos.

As rousing as “The National Game” march is, Sousa’s classic, “Stars and Stripes Forever,” is more uplifting. Written in 1896, and congressionally approved as the nation’s official march in 1987, Sousa’s lyrics have inspired patriotism in generations of Americans:

“Red and white and starry blue
Is freedom’s shield and home.

“Other nations may deem their flags the best
And cheer them with fervid elation

“But the flag of the North and South and West
Is the flag of flags, the flag of Freedom’s nation.

“Hurrah for the flag of the free!
May it wave as our standard forever,
The gem of the land and the sea,
The banner of the right.”

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Copyright 2022 Joe Guzzardi, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Joe Guzzardi is a Progressives for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at [email protected].

At a June 14 Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee meeting, environmentalists warned that the Colorado River’s reservoir level drop might bring dramatic cuts to water deliveries provided to the seven states dependent on the river. Those states are Colorado, California, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, Arizona and Nevada.

Alarmingly, given its importance, the conservation group American Rivers ranked the Colorado as No. 1 on its list of the nation’s most endangered rivers.

Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton told the committee that maintaining “critical levels” at the largest reservoirs in the U.S. – Lake Mead and Lake Powell – will require large reductions in water deliveries. Touton advised the committee that, in the next two months, her agency is negotiating with the seven states that count on the Colorado River to develop a plan for apportioning the water supply reductions.

The Reclamation Bureau is the federal agency charged with assisting the western states, Native American tribes and others to meet water needs. An estimated 40 million residents throughout the region rely on the Colorado for water.

The committee’s witnesses were unanimous in their predictions that acute water shortages are in the near-term future. John Entsminger, the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s general manager, said that the slow-motion train wreck that’s been accelerating for 20 years has created “the moment of reckoning.” Said Entsminger, “We are 150 feet from 25 million Americans losing access to the Colorado River, and the rate of decline is accelerating.”

Because the Western United States is suffering through a relentless drought, analysts predict that next year the affected states will cope with a decrease of between 2 million and 4 million acre-feet of water. Scientific American reported that 2021’s exceptionally dry year created a record-breaking drought, or mega-drought. The last 20 years have been the driest two decades in the last 1,200 years. To date, 2022 is the driest year on record in California. Researchers predict with a 94 percent degree of certainty that California’s drought will continue for at least one more year.

University of Colorado, Boulder climate scientist Imtiaz Rangwala has observed drought conditions increasingly worsen in the western and central U.S. “The last two years have been more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 Celsius) warmer than normal in these regions. Large swaths of the Southwest have been even hotter, with temperatures more than 3 F (1.7 C) higher.”

But neither during the hearing nor in the media writeups was population growth in the seven western states mentioned.

The 2000 populations for Colorado, California, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, Arizona and Nevada were 4.3 million, 33.9 million, 1.8 million, 2.2 million, 494,000, 5.1 million and 2 million, respectively. And in 2022, the states’ populations are, respectively, 5.8 million, 39.5 million, 2.1 million, 3.3 million, 579,000, 7.6 million and 3.2 million. In slightly more than two decades, about 12 million more people have become dependent on the Colorado for water.

The link between more people and more water consumption is undeniable. Yet Congress, the White House, the media and academia refuse to have a rational discussion about reducing the flow of 1 million-plus legal immigrants which, with their offspring, drive population increases.

Knowing that the nation’s western states are in a water crisis, opening the border to millions, as the Biden administration is doing, is ecological suicide. Nevertheless, the status quo on adding population continues on autopilot, consequences be damned.

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Copyright 2022 Joe Guzzardi, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Joe Guzzardi is a Progressives for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at [email protected].

On Father’s Day, 1964, Philadelphia Phillies’ right-hander Jim Bunning pitched a perfect game against the New York Mets in Shea Stadium.

Bunning’s two-hour, 10-minute masterpiece – 90 pitches, 10 strike outs – during a double-header’s first game had special significance. At the time, Bunning and his wife, Mary Theis, had seven children. Eventually, the Bunnings, married 60 years, would have nine children, 35 grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.

Few in baseball history have lived as rewarding a life as Bunning, who represented Kentucky as a U.S. representative from 1987 to 1999, and then as a two-term U.S. senator from 1999 until 2011. Bunning’s baseball achievements put him in the Hall of Fame. Along the way, Bunning racked up 224 wins, 2,855 strike outs and was chosen to participate in nine All-Star Games. The fire-balling righty led the league in strike outs three times, and when he retired Bunning ranked second among all-time strikeout leaders behind Walter Johnson of the Washington Senators.

In 1955, Bunning debuted with the Detroit Tigers, and in 1958, he threw a 3-0 no-hitter against the Boston Red Sox. Bunning was then traded to the Phillies, his second stop in a career that also included brief stints with the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Long after Bunning hung up his glove, he recalled in detail how he set down 27 consecutive Mets, the first National League perfect game since 1880. After attending Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and eating a hearty sausage and egg breakfast, Bunning headed out to Shea Stadium, where the temperature and humidity would hit 90 by game time.

Although Bunning said that he felt no better or no worse than usual as he warmed up, Phillies’ manager Gene Mauch disagreed. Mauch told Sport Magazine’s Larry Merchant, “We knew when he [Bunning] was warming up that this was something special. The way he was throwing so live and as high as he was. Not high with his pitches. High himself.”

For nine innings, Bunning was so relaxed that he rejected the long-standing baseball tradition which forbade pitchers to talk to teammates about no hitters in progress – considered a jinx. “Dive for the ball,” Bunning laughingly told his infielders. “Don’t let anything fall in.”

With one out in the bottom of the ninth, Bunning called catcher Gus Triandos to the mound and asked him to tell him a joke. Triandos shook his head in dismay and went back behind the plate. Bunning then struck out the last two Mets and pounded his glove as his teammates rushed to share his joy in his 6-0 win.

Bunning’s was the fifth perfect game in major-league history and the first in the regular season since the Chicago White Sox Charlie Robertson blanked the Detroit Tigers, 2-0.

Later, Bunning said about his flawless performance: “Everything has to come together, good control, outstanding plays from your teammates, a whole lot of good fortune on your side and a lot of bad luck for the other guys. A million things could go wrong, but on this one particular day of your life none of them do.”

But when Bunning looked back at his 1964 season, disappointment superseded his perfect game’s thrills. By September 20, the Phillies led by 6½-games with 12 to play. But then the wheels fell off. The Phils lost ten in a row; Bunning, overworked by Mauch, was charged with three losses. The St. Louis Cardinals eked out the pennant by a game over the Phils and the Cincinnati Reds.

Before he died at age 85, Bunning said, “I am most proud of the fact I went through nearly 11 years without missing a start. They wrote my name down, and I went to the post.”

In today’s era, Bunning’s consistency would be a marvel.

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Copyright 2022 Joe Guzzardi, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Joe Guzzardi is a Progressives for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at [email protected].

Meta Platforms, until October 2021 known as Facebook, is in turmoil. Infamous for its commitment to employing H-1B workers, and simultaneously undermining qualified U.S. tech workers’ careers, the Silicon Valley titan is finally getting its just rewards.

Sheryl Sandberg, a Facebook fixture for 14 years and the No. 2 behind Mark Zuckerberg, will be leaving this fall. Some analysts have been long-critical of Sandberg, net worth $1.6 billion, and have pushed for at least two years for her ousting. Zuckerberg and Sandberg disagreed over Metaverse’s vision.

Since Sandberg’s replacement, Julian Oliver, has been named, her departure is unlikely to have further measurable negative effect on Meta. But, Oliver will have to assume the responsibility for pulling Meta out of the steady, deep decline the company is struggling with.

Meta Platform’s key Facebook products have grown old. The number of young people actively using Facebook and Instagram has drifted to TikTok, which users see as more compelling. Today, TikTok, dominates the social media industry in screen time, and Amazon has become a leading player in the advertising industry.

Then, to the dismay of its shareholders, the Meta stock price’s plunge in recent weeks has slashed the market cap by about 50 percent to $529 billion from an all-time high, and has cut Zuckerberg’s net worth to about $84 billion. As of June 7, Meta stock has stabilized at $196 per share, 14 percent above its low for the year.

In February, Facebook agreed to pay $90 million to settle a privacy lawsuit which claimed that it impermissibly tracked users after they logged out, and sold their personal information to enrich the company. Along the same lines, in January, the British watchdog group, Financial Conduct Authority, sued Meta for $3.2 billion on behalf of individuals who used Facebook in the UK between 2015 to 2019. The lawsuit claims that Facebook made its users submit personal data in order to access the platform and thereby earned billions of dollars from the tactic, Reuters reported.

For Meta, the bad news keeps piling up. Qualified Black applicants have charged Facebook with shutting them out of key positions because they aren’t a “culture fit,” a possible reference to the large number of Chinese and Indian H-1B visa employees on the staff. Multiple reports allege that hiring managers confirmed to black candidates during interviews that they “could do the job” before using the “culture-fit” excuse to reject the candidate.

Facebook pledges to add 30 percent more people of color in leadership positions by 2025, but it has a long way to go. Despite incessantly touting the company’s commitment to diversity, Facebook’s 2020 Diversity Report showed little progress. Blacks and Hispanics in key technical roles increased year-over-year, from 1 percent to 1.7 percent for blacks and from 3 percent to 4.3 percent for Hispanics. Moreover, since last summer, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is investigating bias claims against Facebook and has recently upgraded its inquiry into a systemic probe that could lead to broader charges.

Meta not only denies middle-management jobs to blacks and Hispanics. The company prefers cheaper, more subservient foreign-born H-1B workers to U.S. tech graduates, a constant in its hiring practices. Zuckerberg, both directly through his congressional testimony and also through FWD.us, the pro-amnesty group he created, staunchly supports higher immigration.

Last year, the Department of Labor and the Department of Justice settled employment discrimination suits against Facebook. Although the settlement sums were paltry for the tech giant, $4.75 million, a civil penalty payable to the federal government and, from the DOJ, up to $9.5 million due the injured parties, Facebook should assume that the charges against it are a warning to clean up its anti-U.S. tech worker bias.

Meta needs a public relations overhaul. An easy place to begin would be to hire U.S. tech workers. Figuratively, Facebook’s image has taken a bigger hit than its net worth. With more than a half-trillion current net worth, even after the stock market blood bath, Meta Platforms/Facebook can afford to hire skilled U.S. tech workers.

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Copyright 2022 Joe Guzzardi, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Joe Guzzardi is a Progressives for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at [email protected].

Since baseball’s earliest years, U.S. presidents have been big fans of the national pastime. Among the most avid baseball fans were William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson and Richard M. Nixon. After his political career ended, the players’ union lobbied to have Nixon appointed to head the Major League Baseball Players Association.

But the only president to every play professional baseball was Dwight Eisenhower, and therein lays a tale.

Eisenhower grew up in rural Abilene, Kan., starred as a right end in football and excelled in center field on his 1908 high school baseball team. Ike’s brother, Edgar, played fullback and first base. Since the Eisenhower family couldn’t afford to send both boys to college, the brothers struck a deal. Edgar went to the University of Michigan, while Dwight worked at a local creamery and sent his wages to his brother.

At age 21, Ike won an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy in West Point and became a star running back alongside another future WWII general, Omar Bradley. The New York Times called Ike “one of the most promising running backs in Eastern football,” but a knee injury ended Eisenhower’s football days. And to what Eisenhower called “one of the greatest disappointments of my life…maybe the greatest,” he didn’t make the Army baseball team.

But Ike had a baseball secret, one that could have altered his life’s course had it become known while he was at West Point. The year before Ike enrolled, and using the pseudonym “Wilson,” he played professional baseball in the Class D Central Kansas League as the Junction City Soldiers’ center fielder. Ike once told the Associated Press that he played poorly and was paid little. But setting off for college, Ike needed even the small sums he earned.

Years later, at a game Ike attended between the New York Giants and the Boston Braves, managers Mel Ott and Bob Coleman asked General Eisenhower to confirm whether he had played professionally, and if so, at what position. Ike half-kiddingly replied, “That’s my secret.”

Ike’s desire for secrecy is understandable. The NCAA has strict rules that prohibit student athletes from playing professionally. If found to have received compensation, the consequences, as Olympic decathlon star Jim Thorpe discovered, are severe. Thorpe was stripped of his two 1912 Olympic gold medals when the committee learned that he had played two seasons of semi-professional baseball and had therefore violated the amateurism rules.

For Eisenhower, his punishment would have been immediate expulsion from West Point.

It’s likely Eisenhower knew he had broken the West Point Code of Honor when he signed a 15-question legibility card attesting to his amateur status. As years passed, Ike stopped talking about his baseball-playing years, instructing his staff to dodge questions. A memo found among Ike’s presidential papers at the Abilene Eisenhower Library read: “As of August 1961, DDE indicated inquiries should not be answered concerning his participation in professional baseball – as it would necessarily become too complicated.”

Had West Point expelled Eisenhower, he might never have become the general who led the Allied forces to victory in World War II, might never have presided as Columbia University’s president and might never have served two U.S. presidential terms.

From his earliest days, Ike truly loved baseball. His favorite story recalls the time when, on a warm Kansas afternoon, he and a young friend went river fishing and fantasized aloud about their futures. The friend told Ike that one day he wanted to be the U.S. president. Dwight said that “he wanted to be a real major league baseball player like Honus Wagner.” In the end, Ike concluded, “Neither one of us got our wish.”

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Copyright 2022 Joe Guzzardi, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Joe Guzzardi is a Society for American Baseball Research and Internet Baseball Writers’ Association member. Contact him at [email protected].

Here are two indisputable facts about President Biden’s open borders agenda.

First, Biden, and Biden alone, approved within his administration’s early days to undo any enforcement provisions that President Trump put into effect, including defunding the border wall, a major illegal immigration deterrent. Biden may have had supportive open borders counseling prior to his inauguration from former President Obama, his then-advisor Valerie Jarrett, U.S. Domestic Policy Council Director Susan Rice or other immigration advocates. But Biden, with his presidential authority, gave open borders the green light. He could have, at any time, ordered border enforcement restored, but he never did. Impugning Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is misdirected blame. Mayorkas takes his orders directly from Biden.

Second, Biden knew, as any experienced politician with 50+ years in D.C. would, that once the word got out to all the world’s corners that entering the U.S. was simply a matter of getting to the border, and surrendering to Customs and Border Protection, a huge illegal immigrant surge would follow. A new Center for Immigration Studies report written by Steven A. Camarota and Karen Zeigler found that since Biden’s January 21, 2021, inauguration the nation’s foreign-born population has increased by 2 million persons and is, the authors aver, “mostly driven by illegal immigration.” More precisely, about two-thirds or 1.35 million of the overall increase resulted from illegal immigration.

Based on federal data from the Census Bureau’s monthly Current Population Survey, Camarota and Zeigler calculated that the U.S. foreign-born population hit an historic high of 47 million in April, representing 14.3 percent of today’s total population, the highest percentage since 1910. Assuming the present open borders agenda continues, and no evidence exists that it will end during Biden’ remaining years in office, the U.S. foreign-born population will reach 14.9 percent of total U.S. population in September 2023, the highest mark in history.

To underline how dramatic the foreign-born increase is, the authors point out that “for the foreign-born population to grow at all, new arrivals must exceed both emigration and deaths, as all births to immigrants in the U.S., by definition, add only to the native-born population.”

The CIS analysis is more than an immigration story; the consequences of such a broad and ill-conceived immigration policy are far-reaching. Through April, DHS released about 1 million illegal immigrants into the interior. Many aliens received parole, an improperly applied immigration status that should be granted on a case-by-case basis. Once paroled, the illegal immigrants qualify for employment authorization and can compete for jobs with millions of unemployed or under-employed Americans. Biden’s goal is parole for all illegal immigrants.

Few in Congress from either the Republican or Democratic parties will address growth, with the huge, unplanned population spikes that it drives. The U.S. is unprepared for the inevitable sprawl and its effect on ever-dwindling natural resources that the nation will be forced to cope with as millions enter illegally. At a minimum, Congress should debate what the proper number of immigrants is that the country can successfully assimilate and integrate.

In Texas, for example, the state has lost 20,000 acres every two months, or about 325 acres daily, of natural habitat and farmland. South Texas is a major entry point for global migrants. “From Sea to Sprawling Sea,” a report that studied land loss attributable to population growth, found that during the 15-year period from 2002 to 2017 – the latest Natural Conservation Resources data available – 67 percent of rural land loss was population growth-related. During that period, about 11,950 square miles of America’s unspoiled rural land were developed to build homes, roads, schools, churches, hospitals and shopping malls to provide for the 37 million more people that lived in the U.S. in 2017 than resided here in 2002.

Just as Biden’s open borders commitment is indisputable, so too is the long-term population growth and urban sprawl that go with it. By the time the full effect of Biden’s border neglect will come to fruition, about mid-century, his congressional enablers and he will be long gone from Earth. But their legacy of leaving behind an overcrowded, resource-depleted nation will live after them in infamy.

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Copyright 2022 Joe Guzzardi, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Joe Guzzardi is a Progressives for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at [email protected].