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Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game, also known as the mid-summer classic, evolved from an unlikely union between National and American League.

Chicago Tribune sports editor Arch Ward came up with his brainstorm in 1933 when the Windy City hosted the Century of Progress Exhibition, later known as the Chicago World’s Fair. Chicago officials asked local sportswriters to submit ideas for a sporting event that would draw out-of-towners to the fair. Ward was convinced that a game between the National and American League’s best players, with teams selected by the fans, would be a huge success. To promote the contest, Ward called it the “the Game of the Century.”

But first, Ward needed the approval of the leagues’ presidents, no small task. Ward persisted, made his case to AL president Will Harridge and NL president John Heydler, and argued the game would showcase the sport and attract baseball bugs nationwide. When Ward offered that the game’s proceeds would be donated to charity, and that the Tribune would guarantee losses in case rain canceled the game, Harridge and Heydler readily agreed.

Since 1933, the All-Star Game has been played every year except 1945 and 2020. For four years from 1959 to 1962, two games were played, an experiment that players disliked and eventually rejected.

The All-Star Game quickly captured the nation’s imagination, and became the year’s most-eagerly anticipated sporting event. Fans selected two squads resplendent with baseball’s greatest stars, many of whom went on to the Hall of Fame. Among them were position players Frankie Frisch, Paul Waner, Pie Traynor, Charlie Gehringer, Joe Cronin, and pitchers Carl Hubbell and the two “Lefty’s,” Gomez and Grove.

The two brightest stars were New York Yankees immortals Lou Gehrig and the Big Bam, Babe Ruth. The All-Star Game was set for July 6, in Chicago’s Comiskey Park.

Gehrig’s participation was in doubt. Yankees’ brass worried that if Gehrig played, the Iron Horse might not be able to return to New York in time for the following day’s game against the Detroit Tigers. The train ride from Chicago to New York took about 24 hours. A missed game would cost Gehrig a chance to break Everett Scott’s consecutive-games-played streak, 1,307.

Gehrig never hesitated. If selected, Gehrig said, “I will go gladly, and give up my chance at Scott’s mark.” Gehrig, who said playing was an “honor,” returned to New York in plenty of time to keep his batting streak going and, on August 17, he broke Scott’s record.

With the details settled, 49,000 fans turned out, a capacity crowd. Even though the nation struggled through the Great Depression years, the seats, priced at regular season rates, sold out in about 45 minutes. Finally, at 1:15 pm, under sunny skies and with balmy temperatures, the umpire called out “Play Ball.”

Fans didn’t have to wait long to see what they came for. In the third inning with a runner on first base Ruth, 38, and his career waning, smashed a low liner into the right field stands. Ruth’s blast accounted for the AL’s winning two-run margin that topped the NL, 4-2.

Ward would have a tough time recognizing the 2021 All-Star Game as a baseball event. which has more in common with a three-ring circus sideshow than baseball.

Under MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred’s direction, the Coors Field’s proceedings are a week-long carnival. Some activities require a ticket, Manfred’s favorite type of corporate-sponsored, income-generating events: The Sirius XM Futures Game; the Celebrity Softball Game featuring, as the MLB website promises, “some of the biggest stars in Hollywood;” the Gatorade Work Out Day, and the T-Mobile Home Run Derby. More money-driven events follow.

On game day, “Baseball’s biggest stars walk in style in The Red Carpet Show.” Denver is the next best thing to being among Hollywood’s glitterati at the Academy Awards.

Finally, the MLB All-Star Game presented by Mastercard, a baseball game of sorts, will begin. The millionaire participants, some of whom earn bonuses for being elected, will make cameo appearances, play for an inning or two, then give way to replacements. For reference, of the 16 position players who started the 1932 inaugural game, 14 played all nine innings.

Manfred has killed baseball’s long-standing traditions with his silly rule changed and his overhaul of the All-Star Game. Dinosaur fans are at the crossroads – go with the Manfred flow and await the inevitable further debasement of the beloved national pastime, or find another, more pleasurable way to while away the long summer months.

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Copyright 2021 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].

Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Coleman was a New York Yankees second baseman who won the 1949 Rookie of the Year award, and in 1950, the World Series Most Valuable Player award.

After his playing career ended in 1957, Coleman broadcast New York Yankees, California Angels and then, for 40 years, San Diego Padres games. Coleman also had a brief, unsuccessful stint as the Padres manager.

Although Ted Williams and Coleman served in World War II and Korea, only Coleman saw active duty in both conflicts. In World War II, Williams was a stateside flying instructor, while Coleman flew Douglas SBD Dauntless bombers over the Pacific.

Williams and Coleman were flying buddies in Korea. During Williams’ 39 Korean combat missions, often as Colonel John Glenn’s wingman, enemy fire hit the plane of “Teddy Ballgame” and forced a crash landing. But as harrowing as Williams’ experience was, during one flight deep into North Korea, Coleman watched his tentmate Max Harper, flying just ahead of him, get shot down and perish.

Despite the emotional burden of seeing his good friend killed in battle, Coleman carried on.

In his autobiography “An American Journey: My Life on the Field, In the Air and On the Air,” Coleman wrote about his early, challenging youth in San Francisco. Coleman’s father, Gerald, a former Pacific Coast League catcher with the San Francisco Seals and the Seattle Rainiers, drank heavily. One evening, suspecting that his wife Pearl was two-timing him, Gerald followed her to a local nightclub, and shot her several times, a crime for which he was never prosecuted.

Young Coleman went to live with his grandmother, and excelled at sandlot baseball and high school basketball. In 1944, he enrolled in the Navy’s V-5 flight training program at age 18, the minimum age for the training. Coleman eagerly enlisted; he feared that World War II might end before he saw action.

With the war over, the Yankees activated Coleman just in time for the thrilling 1949 pennant race that the Bronx Bombers won on the season’s last day by beating the Boston Red Sox.

Coleman had a career year in 1950, but the Marines recalled him at the end of the 1951 season. By 1953, he had learned to fly Corsair attack planes, and was sent to Korea. By the end of the 1953 season, the 29-year-old Coleman, now physically and emotionally exhausted, returned to the Yankees where he struggled in his few token appearances.

Coleman’s on-the-field slump continued in 1954 and 1955. By 1957, the playing days of the 33-year-old Coleman were over, and he embarked on his broadcasting career which eventually landed him in the Cooperstown Baseball Hall of Fame, where he received the Ford C. Frick Award for excellence in baseball broadcasting.

Coleman’s only baseball regret was when he piloted the Padres in the 1980s. San Diego finished last in their division, and Coleman happily returned to the broadcast booth where he spent more than four decades in total calling the Padres games.

When Coleman died at age 89 in La Jolla, Calif., he was a San Diego icon, most often known around town by his nickname, “The Colonel.” C. Paul Rogers III in his Society for Baseball Research Coleman biography wrote that the bona fide war hero was buried with full military honors, including a 21-gun salute and an F-18 flyover in the missing-man formation.

Looking back at his long and memorable life, Coleman said that he was most proud of his U.S. Marine Corp dive-bomber, fighter pilot days during his 57 World War II missions, and 63 Korean War missions. Coleman won 13 Air Metals, two Distinguished Flying Cross citations, the World War II Victory Metal, and eight other awards.

Coleman once said that America “is bigger than baseball.”

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Copyright 2021 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].

As we celebrate Independence Day, millions of Americans wonder if we’re witnessing first-hand democracy’s end, and our historic, sovereign nation’s slow but steady dissolution.

Evidence abounds that the grim possibilities are already well underway. Look no further than South Dakota, where the Biden administration, via the National Parks Department, has arbitrarily denied the state a permit to hold its magnificent annual Mt. Rushmore fireworks display. The administration offered the insincere, dishonest excuse that the COVID-19 threat still lurks.

The true reason Mt. Rushmore has been banned from holding its traditional fireworks display is to punish South Dakota and its Republican governor Kristi Noem. Noem, a possible 2024 GOP presidential challenger, unabashedly supported President Trump, who carried the state by 62 percent. She also refused to shut down during COVID-19. Biden is using the hammer to punish his Republican political opposition.

To rub salt into South Dakota’s wounds, the Bidens will host 1,000 guests on the White House South Lawn for a July 4 barbecue, and to watch a pyrotechnic display over the National Mall.

Biden’s ham-fisted, petty Mt. Rushmore bungling will soon fade from the headlines. But behind the scenes, in a less publicized development that will have long-term, nation-breaking consequences, Congress is plotting to pass an amnesty (or perhaps a series of small amnesties) that will forever alter the country’s future.

Although nation-breaking sounds alarmist, consider that amnesty for an unknown total of unlawfully present illegal immigrants – estimates range for 12 to 25 million – means that eventually they’ll petition nuclear and non-nuclear family members.

Princeton University estimates that, based on historical trends, new Green Card holders petition an average of three relatives – brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews and even in-laws. Doing the simple math, a 2021 amnesty creates potentially anywhere from 36 million to 75 million new immigrants. This is exclusive of the illegal aliens that continue to cross into the country unimpeded. Combined, these are totals that the nation can’t support either environmentally or fiscally.

Without taking into account the illegal alien surge – U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported 520,000 border apprehensions in March, April and May, a 21-year record – the Census Bureau projects that by 2050, the U.S. will have more than 100 million additional residents, a 31 percent increase, for a total population of 439 million. No one on Capitol Hill dares go on the record that their constituents’ communities might expand 31 percent during the next three decades if amnesty is enacted.

Although chain migration is immigration’s biggest multiplier, and even though no one has a clue what today’s actual illegal immigrant count is, the Biden administration is determined to force amnesty upon a reluctant public that wants less, not more, immigration.

The Associated Press and the Miami Herald reported that lead Senate Democrats like New Jersey’s Robert Menendez and California’s Alex Padilla, spurred on by immigration expansion advocates, including the Chamber of Commerce, Facebook Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us and former President George W. Bush, want Biden to include amnesty as part of his $6 trillion infrastructure bill or any other major legislation that may come to the floor of Congress. In addition to the existing illegally present population, included for Green Card status would be those holding or eligible for deferred action for childhood arrivals, so-called DACAs, Temporary Protected Status enrollees, and whoever the government designates as essential employees.

Traditionally, columnists write inspiring Independence Day columns that praise the Founding Fathers’ wisdom and American excellence. While George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, John Jay, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton brilliantly formed a new independent government in 1776 based on freedom, equality and opportunity, principles and ideals that still serve the country well, the country is undeniably at a critical turning point with her democracy and founding principles at risk.

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Copyright 2021 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].

Earlier this month, the United States Post Office issued stamps to honor the heroic World War II service of Japanese Americans.

Hawaii Governor David Ige unveiled the forever stamp that featured Nisei soldier Shiroku “Whitey” Yamamoto, a member of the all-Japanese American 100th Infantry Battalion/442nd Regimental Combat Team whose fighting motto was “Go for Broke.” Yamamoto’s image is from his photograph taken in 1944 at a railroad station in France.

During World War II, the Roosevelt administration looked suspiciously at U.S. Japanese families, and denied them their constitutional rights during periods of forced removal from their lifelong homes. The displaced Japanese were sent to barracks in one of 10 U.S. relocation detention centers. Nevertheless, even though many of their relatives were imprisoned, the “Go for Broke” volunteer soldiers remained steadfastly loyal to America, and served with indomitable spirit and uncommon valor. More than 33,000 Japanese Americans fought in WWII, and more than 700 were killed or wounded; the regiment was awarded 9,000 Purple Hearts and 18,000 individual decorations.

Miles away from the European and Pacific battlefields, the detained Nisei, forced to live in brutal conditions, also demonstrated great courage. Determined not to let their adverse circumstances overwhelm them – “shikata ga nai,” or translated, “it cannot be helped” – the Nisei held at Manzanar fell in love, married, had children, published the Manzanar Free Press, planted flower and vegetable gardens, organized dances, formed teaching groups for young children, offered dental services, and opened a canteen that sold cigarettes, soda pop, and non-rationed food items. Between March 1942 and November 1945, 120,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated at Manzanar and the other relocation centers.

For internees, baseball was by far the most popular entertainment. The government took away the prisoners’ radios, cameras and for native Issei prohibited their Japanese language. Detainees were allowed to bring only what they could carry in two suitcases, but they were not denied the pleasure of playing the national pastime. Quoted in Kerry Yo Nakagawa’s book, “Japanese American Baseball in California,” George Omachi said, “Without baseball, camp life would have been unbearable. It was humiliating and demeaning being incarcerated in one’s own country.” Omachi, whose family was transported from California by train to the Jerome War Relocation Center, in Denson, Arkansas, would later become a Houston Astros and New York Mets scout who helped develop Hall of Fame pitcher Tom Seaver.

One of the great ironies about camp baseball was that the diamonds were built outside of the barbed wire fences that surrounded the centers. As Sab Yamata, a Manzanar prisoner, explained, there was no reason for prison guards to worry. Miles and miles of desert stretched out as far as the eye could see; escape would be futile. “Where would you run to?” Yamata asked.

Once the players donned their uniforms, they traveled by Greyhound Bus far and wide to play baseball, often for two-week trips. California teams went to Wyoming and Colorado to play against other regional teams. Eventually, the Free Press covered 100 men’s baseball teams and 14 women’s softball teams like the Dusty Chicks and the Montebello Gophers. The Dusty Chicks All-Star catcher, Rosie Kakaucchi, said her team was so good that when the Chicks challenged the men, they won.

Nakagawa provided an interesting look back at camp baseball. At the beginning, Nakagawa wrote, conditions were dismal, and morale was low. But baseball created a positive atmosphere and helped Japanese Americans maintain self-esteem. Fans turned out to watch the games “to bring a sense of normalcy to the futility of daily life.”

By January 1945, Japanese Americans were released from the camps. Even though not a single case of treason or espionage had been brought against the former detainees, often they were still treated as traitors. Again, baseball helped them re-enter, regroup and slowly resettle into mainstream society. In Sanger, Calif., the high school baseball team fielded seven Nisei starters, and won the Fresno County championship. Dan Takeuchi remembered that when he came back from camp and earned a spot on his titled-winning team, he knew that baseball would allow the players to “do a lot of healing…and let others know that we were just going to go on very positively.”

President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 that provided letters of apology and $20,000 to internment camp survivors. Ultimately, more than 82,000 survivors received redress. The apology came four decades too late, and given the inexcusable treatment the federal government forced upon Japanese Americans, $20,000 is a pittance compared to the hardships they endured.

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Copyright 2021 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].

Down on the Southwest border, business is booming – criminal business, that is.

The federal government steadfastly refuses to protect the border or the interior. Since Day 1, the Biden administration has announced to the world that protections that President Trump put into place would be canceled, and that both Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security would be neutered.

Those ill-advised White House decisions have enabled drug and human traffickers to make small fortunes transporting their cargo to the United States, where taxpayers will foot the bill for housing, education and eventually a host of other affirmative benefits. Not a peep from Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris or the president’s cabinet about the unfairness or the devastating long-term effects their indifference will have on the nation.

But for enterprising criminals, the income potential from Biden’s willful neglect is virtually unlimited.

When border patrol agents finally apprehended Victoria Perez, she told them she earned $200,000 over a ten-month period smuggling aliens through the El Paso checkpoint. Perez’s fee was $1,500 per individual if the checkpoint was closed; $600 if open. Her work was easy. By driving only two days a week, Perez raked in, calculated Washington Times reporter Stephen Dinan, more than sitting members of Congress, $174,000 annually, and about three-times a border agent’s $70,000 starting salary. Perez was apprehended at a Texas checkpoint with 12 passengers, or at $1,500 a head, a load worth $18,000. Although Perez pled guilty, she was arrested again for trafficking during the six-month period before she was ordered to jail.

Income opportunities abound for other players in human trafficking’s criminal endeavor. Stash house operators, deliverymen who bring food and other supplies to the stash house, and extortionists who beat migrants to force their families to shell out more on top of the already exorbitant fees paid up front. In all, migrants pay billions of dollars each year to be dangerously and illegally smuggled into the U.S., a dicey gamble that sometimes ends in apprehension or even death. Migrant deaths at the border have nearly tripled since the same time last year, from 45 to 128.

Experts predict that fees will rise as long as the Biden administration continues to encourage illegal crossing. Harris’ much-touted trip to Mexico and Guatemala to uncover migration’s root causes was laughed off by those governments as a waste of their time, a conclusion that the White House agreed with.

Facebook, the world’s largest social media company and prominent anti-First Amendment power broker, is aiding and abetting the smugglers. Thanks to soaring advertising revenues, Facebook posted its strongest first quarter earnings, a revenue of $26.1 billion, 48 percent more than the $17.7 billion it garnered in last year’s first quarter, and nearly $3 billion more than Wall Street analysts anticipated. Net income also smashed analysts’ expectations, hitting $9.5 billion, double 2020’s $4.9 billion.

Facebook’s willingness to accept drug money from Mexican cartels contributed to the company’s advertising revenue and its staggering quarterly income surge.

Florida Rep. Kat Cammack sent a letter to Facebook after she uncovered ads for human smugglers and cartels on the platform. Cammack said migrant border crossing treks are organized via Facebook communications. Upon arriving in the Donna, Texas, processing facility, Cammack asked young migrants how they came to the U.S. All responded that they coordinated logistics through Facebook, paid through Facebook and exchanged ideas on the Facebook-owned WhatsApp. A link titled “Viaje a Estados Unidos” took Cammack to a page with directions, routes and prices: $6,000 to enter the United States, $9,300 for drop-off in San Antonio.

According to U.S. law, encouraging or inducing an alien to come to, enter or reside in the U.S., or aiding and abetting any of these activities, is subject to financial penalties and imprisonment for periods of five years or longer. The likelihood of the Biden administration criminally punishing Facebook is a statistical impossibility – less than zero. Facebook played a prominent role in assuring that Biden would be elected, and the president isn’t likely to punish his friend regardless of the helping hand it provides in the illegal border surge.

During Biden’s presidency, immigration crime perpetrators go unpunished, but Americans must unfairly endure migrant waves flowing into their local communities, and then subsidize the everyday lives of these people for the indefinite future. Nothing could be more unjust.

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Copyright 2021 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].

Two and a half months have passed since President Joe Biden designated Vice President Kamala Harris as his administration’s border czar. Harris, who half-heartedly accepted her daunting new task, has neither been to the Southwest border to personally watch the ongoing illegal immigrant influx nor given a press conference on the subject.

But she did meet with Alejandro Giammattei and Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the Guatemalan and Mexican presidents, to address what the White House refers to as migration’s “root causes.”

The Biden administration’s critics, specifically of its border mismanagement, are disappointed that a two-day public relations trip is offered up as a serious approach to the grave problem that tens of thousands of arriving migrants represents. On the eve of her trip, officials announced that Harris will offer coronavirus vaccines, and millions of dollars towards humanitarian relief, food insecurity and anti-corruption measures.

That’s all well and good. The U.S. should take every reasonable measure to help struggling Central Americans. But those are, at best, long-term solutions that do little to offset decades of the federal government’s tolerance (if not encouragement) of illegal immigration.

Harris doesn’t have to look far to identify the true root cause of the border surges: the presidential campaign rhetoric that Biden and she engaged in, along with Biden’s post-inauguration determination to open the border, and to gut Immigration Customs and Enforcement, as well as Customs and Border Protection. On Biden’s first day as president, he signed 17 executive orders that expanded immigration.

Leading up to and during her failed 2020 presidential effort, Harris spoke out in favor of decriminalizing illegal border crossing, offering health care to unlawfully present immigrants, and indirectly compared ICE to the KKK.

Then, as if to one-up Harris, Biden promised that “no one would be deported at all” during his administration’s first 100 days, and promised amnesty for the existing illegal immigrant population, possibly as many as 20 million. As part of Biden’s plan, illegal immigrants deported during the Trump administration would be flown back to the U.S. at taxpayer expense to qualify for amnesty.

To minimize the heat and to keep from dashing her well-known presidential ambitions too quickly given the near-impossible nature of her assignment, Harris is downplaying her mission as simply fact-finding. But if Harris were sincerely interested in facts, she would have engaged another of the Northern Triangle presidents, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele.

In an interview with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, Bukele spoke the harsh truth that Harris would prefer not to hear. Before his interview, Carlson reminded his audience that immigration has, over the last 30 years, contributed to a 100 million population increase, and that mass illegal immigration is permanent because few get sent home. Bukele, while acknowledging that El Salvador has largely failed to provide economically for its citizens, told Carlson that mass immigration is “bad for both of us.”

Over the years, more than a third of Salvadorans have migrated, most to the U.S. Many are young, bold and ambitious – the profile of people who could eventually improve their native country. As Bukele explained, loose immigration in the U.S. helps makes El Salvador a net exporter of people, not products or services. The result is that the Salvadoran economy becomes dependent on remittances from the U.S. For the U.S., immigration goes up, population increases, and El Salvador remains dependent on money sent home, a “bad economic formula” for both countries, Bukele concluded.

If it pleases him, Biden can send Harris on a fool’s errand, but few Americans are deceived by his unconstitutional plan – little or no enforcement and wide-open borders, the most radical, unprecedented immigration agenda in presidential history that defies laws that Congress has passed.

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Copyright 2021 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].

Businesses headquartered in New York City have, in large numbers, either relocated elsewhere or plan to leave, mainly to Florida or other welcoming locations in the Southeast.

Some businesses like Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan & Co. have Wall Street roots that date back to the mid-19th century. Thousands of high-paying financial institution jobs packed up and left as employers such as Credit Suisse, Morgan Stanley, Barclays, UBS, Citigroup and Alliance moved staffers to less expensive destinations in North Carolina, Salt Lake City, Dallas and Nashville.

Residents, too, can’t flee Manhattan fast enough. About 3.57 million people, including many high-income earners, left Manhattan between January 1 and December 7, 2020. Although millions, mostly lower income, arrived to replace them, the net exodus cost the city $34 billion in revenue.

Individuals and businesses both cited the same reasons for getting out of Dodge while the getting was still good: high taxes, soaring living costs, Mayor Bill de Blasio’s inept governance, calls to defund the police amidst ever-increasing, random crime, and questionable school shutdowns.

While legitimate businesses, and the executives who manage them, are bolting from the Big Apple, another albeit less savory industry with dubious oversight is thriving. In New York, birth tourism, the blatant federal immigration law abuser, is resurgent.

Operators set up a website in the foreign national’s native language, most frequently Chinese but also Korean, Russian and Spanish, to encourage pregnant women to pay between $40,000 and $80,000. In exchange for the princely sums, the women will receive coaching on how to deceive airport immigration officials, how to obtain ethnically specific care once in the U.S., and how to birth an American citizen child.

Too often, U.S. taxpayers pick up a big chunk of the tab. One Chinese couple paid the indigent hospital rate – $4,080 – even though they had more than $225,000 in a bank account that they opened to pay for luxury shopping sprees.

It’s unknown how many skip out on payment altogether in the U.S. Leaving unpaid medical bills for birthing babies has been reported in the Northern Marianas, significant because, as U.S. territory, children born here are eligible for U.S. citizenship. A reported birth tourism case in Canada left a hospital with an unpaid $1.2 million neonatal bill.

Little in the birthing industry has changed since the practice became common 30 years ago. A May 15 New York Post story revealed that in the greater metropolitan area 80 birthing centers operate brazenly. Yet Congress inexplicably continues to tolerate what amounts to several federal felonies being carried out, punishment-free, under their noses: visa application fraud, money laundering, Medicare fraud, income tax fraud and identity theft.

Birth tourism is terrible for America, and poses a national security threat. Anchor babies, granted U.S. citizenship under the 14th Amendment’s misinterpretation, mean that thousands of individuals will, through a fraudulent process, receive free K-12 public education and myriad other affirmative benefits. Eventually, they will serve as anchors for their returned parents, and non-nuclear, extended family members who will receive the same entitlements.

With political courage, three solutions could in short order end birth tourism. First, prosecute offenders to the law’s full extent, including mothers. After obtaining a medical certificate that the mother can safely travel, fly her home. Otherwise, she can give birth while detained, under a medical doctor’s care, and then be sent home. She’ll achieve her original goal, a citizen child, but under dramatically different circumstances than she originally envisioned.

Second, Congress must toughen up. Remove the citizenship enticement; pass legislation that citizenship requires at least one parent be a citizen or a lawfully present resident. Not surprisingly, previous efforts at commonsense birth citizenship reform had few congressional cosponsors.

Third, utilize the “fruit from the poisonous tree” doctrine which, in birth citizenship cases, would mean that the citizenship benefits were ill-gotten, and therefore must be forfeited to the government, e.g., citizenship revoked. Congress must not keep rolling over on the three-decade old birth tourism scam that hurts Americans and helps foreign nationals, mostly Chinese.

These bold but lawful actions would minimize and eventually end birth tourism travel. The proposed remedies are simple, direct and legal. Nevertheless, an inert Congress steadfastly refuses to implement any of the three, and is content to tacitly endorse the jus soli process – Latin meaning “the right of soil” – that other most developed nations abolished long ago.

The U.S. should join other advanced nations, and grant treasured citizenship based on the child’s parents’ nationality or resident status.

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Copyright 2021 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].

Whether Warren Spahn was on the mound or in World War II trenches, his opponents agreed that no one was tougher.

Spahn’s 363 career wins are the most of any left-hander (he won 75 games after his 40th birthday), and he dominated during the modern post-1920 era, an exceptional achievement since he didn’t win his first game until age 25. He is legitimately among the top ten pitchers in baseball history, and many of Spahn’s achievements and records will never be matched.

Spahn often joked with scribes about his pitching arsenal – fastball, curve, circle curve, slider, screwball, knuckleball and change-up which he delivered overhand, three-quarters motion or sidearm, and at speeds ranging from 75 MPH to 90 MPH. In all, Spahn could fool batters with an assortment of 40 different pitches. But Spahn said that despite his deep bag of tricks, he only needed two pitches – “the one they’re looking for and the one to cross them up.”

On July 2, 1963, pitching for the Milwaukee Braves, the 42-year-old Spahn faced the San Francisco Giants’ Juan Marichal, 25 years his junior. Sixteen innings later, and after four hours and fifteen minutes, both eventual Hall of Fame pitchers were still toiling away. Giants’ manager Alvin Dark wanted to pinch hit for Marichal in the 13th inning. But an outraged Marichal, who threw 227 pitches that night, refused: “A 42-year-old man is still pitching. I can’t come out!”

During WWII, Spahn showed the same determination and grit that foreshadowed his extraordinary baseball career. At the war’s outbreak, he enlisted in the Army, and received combat engineering training in Camp Gruber, near Tulsa, Oklahoma. Two years later, Spahn arrived in France as part of the 1159th Engineer Combat Group’s 276th Battalion, where he was assigned to repair Nazi-demolished roads and bridges.

Spahn fought in and was injured during the Battle of the Bulge and at the Ludendorff Bridge. Defending the bridge, vital to the allies, Spahn was struck in the foot by incoming shrapnel that surgeons later removed. Spahn remembered that when the day’s fighting ended, he went to sleep with his feet frozen, and woke up with them still frozen.

Spahn deflected praise for his bravery, later saying he served with “a tough bunch of guys. We had people that were let out of prison to go into the service…. they were tough and rough and I had to fit that mold.” Knowing that Nazi soldiers often disguised themselves in U.S. Army uniforms, Spahn’s unit developed a plan to weed out imposters. If a suspected Nazi couldn’t name the Brooklyn Dodgers shortstop, Eddie Stanky, the fraud’s fate was sealed.

The most decorated baseball player in WWII, Spahn earned a Bronze Star, a Purple Heart and a presidential citation.

Spahn’s war heroism cost him three full seasons and 400 wins. But, career-wise, Spahn viewed his war experiences positively. “After what I went through overseas, I never thought of anything I was told to do in baseball as hard work,” Spahn said. “You get over feeling like that when you spend days on end sleeping in frozen tank tracks in enemy-threatened territory. The Army taught me what’s important and what isn’t.”

True heroes, Spahn added, never returned.

As Spahn continued to pitch effectively year after year, his long-time nemesis Stan Musial predicted that the Braves’ ace would never get to the Hall of Fame because “He won’t stop pitching.” But Spahn’s career finally ended after the Braves sold him in 1964 to the New York Mets, who soon released him. He played one more year for the Giants in 1965, and at 44-years-old was given his release after the season.

“I didn’t retire from baseball. Baseball retired me,” Spahn said.

Spahn pitched a handful of games in the early 1970s for the Mexico City Tigers and for the AAA Tulsa Oilers before spending a few tumultuous seasons as a pitching coach for the St. Louis Cardinals, the Cleveland Indians and in the Los Angeles Angels minor league system. By then, Spahn was outspoken about his dislike for air travel, long-haired players and designated hitters.

In 1973, the Hall of Fame inducted Spahn, who joked that his career lasted so long that he was the only man in baseball history to play both before and after Casey Stengel was deemed a genius. In 2003 Spahn, by then wealthy from his 2,000-acre Oklahoma cattle ranch and oil leasing, died in Broken Arrow from multiple medical complications.

Numerous posthumous awards followed, including statues of Spahn in Oklahoma City and Guthrie, Oklahoma that celebrate the war hero and his intimidating high-kick motion.

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Copyright 2021 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].

Recently, the U.S. Department of Labor announced an 18-month delay in the effective date of the final rule, “Strengthening Wage Protections for the Temporary and Permanent Employment of Certain Aliens in the United States,” mostly foreign nationals working on employment-based visas.

The final rule, originally published in January 2021, will now become effective on November 14, 2022. The greater likelihood, however, is that the rule will be delayed again or totally ignored.

The Department of Labor’s official explanation is that the one-and-a-half-year pushback will provide the department time to evaluate the legality and policy consequences of the Trump administration’s order and also allow time to review public feedback.

The agency’s official statement is, at best, misleading, and is, in truth, a brazen falsehood.

The department isn’t concerned about “legality” or “policy consequences,” but rather with pressing on with Biden’s agenda to subvert American workers, and appease the immigration lobby. The main beneficiaries of the extended delay are corporations that hire H-1B, H-1B1 and E-3 visa employees. Those visa categories apply to, respectively, tech workers, so-called specialty workers from Chile and Singapore, and so-called specialty workers from Australia. A review of the jobs for which foreign-born, alleged specialty workers have been hired shows that the tasks they perform are hardly special, and could easily be done by Americans – teachers, accountants and information technology engineers.

The website moneycontrol.com, which concentrates on Indian financial news, confirmed that the wage hike delay is “indeed a huge relief” to Indian nationals, since they are the “largest beneficiaries of the visa.” In FY 2019, more than 70 percent of H-1B visas issued went to Indians. By extension, a win for Indians and Chinese – the other significant visa beneficiaries – also means another setback for American workers hoping to get a fair shake from the Biden administration.

President Trump’s order, which the Biden administration has temporarily gutted, aimed to significantly raise the minimum wages U.S. employers must pay to foreign workers on visa programs. Hiking foreign laborers’ wages would, in turn, protect American workers from being undercut by cheaper overseas labor. The Economic Policy Institute found that nearly 60 percent of new H-1B positions are certified at wage levels “well below the local median wage for the occupation.”

Critics perceive Biden’s craven display of anti-American worker corporatism as a reward to the Silicon Valley elites, such as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. They profit from cheap foreign labor, and played a central role in President Trump’s 2020 defeat.

This indefensible 18-month delay comes on top of an earlier three-month delay announced in March, and is one of Biden’s many America-last proposals. Another example: Biden wants to allow foreign students on F-1 visas, which limit employment privileges to on-campus jobs and give permission to remain and work in the U.S. for ten years, after which they would receive Green Cards.

If approved, Biden’s plan for international students would represent a massive expansion of the Optional Practical Training Program and Curricular Practical Training, which has about 400,000 participants who can work in the U.S. for up to three years if their degrees are in science, technology, engineering or math, and thereby compete directly with U.S. college graduates.

The Optional Practical Training Program was a one-year work authorization program for international students that later turned into a secondary cheap labor pipeline. Congress never approved the program, which today is larger in terms of its participants than more well-established guest worker programs that the Immigration Act of 1990 created.

Donor-class employers love employees through this program because they’re hired for being compliant. The foreign-born workers are on a time-expiration work permit and are looking for eventual H-1B visa sponsorship to transfer their legal status to, giving employers leverage in holding these foreign workers indentured.

Biden’s callous disregard for American workers and their families is unprecedented. The original intention of F-1 visas was for international students to get a better education than was available to them in their native land. Part of the deal was that the students agreed to return home, and apply their U.S.-gained knowledge to improve their emerging countries. Instead, these students, whose parents never paid taxes into the U.S. university system, can stay for extended periods and inevitably take well-paid, white-collar jobs that Americans deserve.

In post-pandemic, high-unemployment, inflation-ridden America, talented and eager U.S. college graduates deserve a fair shake, something the Biden administration willfully denies them.

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Copyright 2021 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].

Customs and Border Protection isn’t returning or detaining illegal migrant crossers, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement isn’t removing aliens from the interior, including convicted, released criminals.

The inevitable result: a huge U.S. population surge that will help create a chaotic society which will struggle to keep up with deteriorating conditions. From the sudden, unanticipated population growth, there will be maximum strain on K-12 education, health care, public safety and other social services which can barely provide for existing residents.

Under the Biden administration, which comically ordered CBP and ICE to stop using the terms illegal alien and assimilation in favor of “more inclusive language” like “noncitizen” and “civic integration,” border agents’ tasks consist mostly of turning over unaccompanied minors to Health and Human Services, or catching but then releasing adults into the interior. Should released aliens run afoul of the law once in the U.S. interior, the Biden administration has ordered ICE to turn a blind eye.

Privately, ICE officials told Washington Post reporter Nick Miroff that their jobs have essentially been abolished because the administration severely limited their ability to arrest and deport illegal immigrants. In April, ICE deported 2,962 aliens, a 20 percent decline from March, and the first time since the agency began keeping records that the monthly total dropped below 3,000.

In the administration’s most defiant federal law violation, Biden mandated that ICE detainers only be issued to incarcerated aliens that he as president thinks should be deported. Biden’s order disregards the removal grounds that the law lists, except possibly for suspected terrorists or others who may pose a public security threat. Florida, Texas and Louisiana filed suits against the Biden administration for its illegal enforcement restrictions that endanger the public at large. Released criminals can imperil society. The Bureau of Justice Statistics shows that the recidivism rates for state prisoners are 68 percent within three years, 79 percent within six years, and 83 percent within nine years.

Alleging that the White House is responsible for putting the public at risk, the Florida suit argues that “the Biden administration does not believe that being in the U.S. in violation of the immigration laws and committing serious crimes is sufficient reason to remove someone from the country.” Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody charged the Biden administration with “thumbing its nose” at its legal obligation to deport criminal aliens. Instead, Moore continued, the administration’s ICE retainer cancelation policy has put convicted sex offenders, heroin traffickers and home invaders back on the street, and among unsuspecting Floridians.

In his opinion column published in The Hill, Nolan Rappaport, a former House Judiciary Committee executive branch immigration law specialist and one-time Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security and Claims immigration counsel, expressed concern about Biden’s rejection of the Immigration and Nationality Act’s removal grounds. Rappaport wrote that Biden has completely replaced existing removal laws with priority categories, a violation of the Constitution’s separation of powers principle. Congress, Rappaport correctly concluded, writes the nation’s laws – not the president.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration cannot keep track of the unaccompanied migrants that have successfully entered mainstream America. Two weeks ago, about 150 young migrants ages 7-12 arrived in Erie, Pa., approximately 1,800 miles from McAllen, Texas, a focal point of the border crisis. Republican Rep. Mike Kelly, whose district includes Erie, went to investigate the young migrants’ housing facility, and found that 28 children had COVID-19. The following day, the site was abandoned; the children and the staff were gone. Kelly tried to get more information from the Department of Health and Human Services, but couldn’t get answers.

Biden and his immigration advisors refer to their border magnanimity as humane. But Kelly said that, referring to the Erie facility’s abrupt shut down, Biden’s approach is aimless. And because residents have been unwittingly exposed to COVID-19, the health of Kelly’s 16th Congressional district’s 705,687 constituents is jeopardized.

The administration shows no sign of making meaningful improvements to address the border chaos or its dangerous revisions regarding retainers. The administration remains indifferent. So far, the best indication that the administration may be vaguely aware of the border crisis is a virtual meeting that Vice President Kamala Harris held with Mexico’s President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. But they avoided tough talk, and only discussed nebulous ideas like the need to “create a sense of home” in Northern Triangle countries.

Former Acting CBP commissioner Mark Morgan estimates that between 3,000 and 3,500 illegal aliens enter the U.S. daily. Given those totals, much more than a vapid Harris phone call is needed to stem the illegal migrant surge.

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