Cagle World

Last fall, I took an extended road trip through the Great American Southwest. During my travels, I spent about a week in the Las Vegas area, and came upon a quaint ice cream shop just on the outskirts of town. Since the small store offered early morning cortados, a light lunch menu, and a variety of ice cream and gelato, I gravitated toward the shop and avoided the raucous casino buffet scene.

During my Las Vegas visit and based in part on my long-ago ownership of an Eastern Long Island ice cream store, I developed a casual friendship with the shop’s proprietress, an Italian national I’ll call Paola.

One day, I asked Paola if she had a sponsor who petitioned for her. No, Paola said, she was a diversity lottery (DV) winner. After years of failed attempts, Paola said she finally won, packed up and headed to the United States. I congratulated Paola, and said that soon she would be able to sponsor her immediate family. But Paola told me that she was divorced, childless and, unlike most DVs, had no desire to sponsor her extended family.

Paola is the only DV I’ve ever met. I can only guesstimate where among the 50,000 annual winners she would rank on an overall suitability scale, but I’ll put her down for high. Paola owns her own business, and is therefore not social services-dependent. She speaks English, and doesn’t plan to sponsor anyone. These are all huge pluses.

But if it’s true that Paola is more productive than most DV winners, she’s still not bringing that much to the party. Within a ten-mile radius of her ice cream shop, there were at least a half dozen other similar businesses. And Paola employs only two part-time weekend teenage workers who earn minimum wage. Paola isn’t an essential contributor, and judging by the modest foot traffic I observed, her high overhead business ‒ astronomical rent in a popular strip mall, and monstrous utility bills to keep those freezers cranking in 100-degree Nevada summer weather ‒ is merely scraping by.

Every year when 50,000 DV lottery winners strike it rich, symbolically speaking, immigration restrictionists bang their collective heads against the wall. Congress should eliminate the pointless DV even if it can’t get its act together on any other commonsense immigration reduction measure. The DV is the polar opposite of sensible.

Created as part of the Immigration Act of 1990, the diversity lottery’s goal was to randomly bring immigrants from countries that have low send rates. As a result, the majority of the visas go to individuals who have few modern-day skills and no U.S. family ties. The question is often asked why the State Department awards globally coveted Green Cards randomly when Ivy League colleges and Wall Street have a rigid process for who they admit.

Moreover, the DV is unfair to immigrants who comply with U.S. laws. The visa lottery program does not prohibit illegal aliens from applying. Most family-sponsored immigrants currently face years-long waits to obtain a visa, yet the lottery program pushes 50,000 random migrants to the head of the line.

Since 2005, several efforts to eliminate the DV have been introduced in Congress, and failed to advance. As a tragic consequence, in 2017, Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, a 2010 Uzbekistan DV winner, killed eight and injured eleven when he drove his truck down a bike path in lower Manhattan. President Trump demanded more thorough DV vetting, but the Saipov case quickly faded out of the headlines.

In 1990, the U.S. population was 249 million, with foreign-born individuals comprising 7.9 percent. Today’s population is 329 million, of which a record 44 million are foreign-born (13.3 percent)

Based on the DV results since 1990, more immigration and a higher foreign-born population, Congress should declare the program a success, and end it. Needlessly adding more people to an already overcrowded nation is foolish.

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

The latest pro-immigration talking point is that since the U.S. has an abundance of wide-open spaces, record legal immigration levels should continue, and perhaps even increase. While there may be some remote pockets across America where people have enough room to breathe, those open spaces are filling up fast. More immigration, already at more than 1 million annually, with no reduction in sight, would add to the overcrowding. If the objective is to cram as many inhabitants as possible into every square mile, then more immigration is the solution.

The argument immigration activists make – “there’s plenty of room” – ignores the more important point. The debate shouldn’t be about how many more people the U.S. can physically accommodate, but how many people the nation can sustain, and be certain that their quality of life will be consistent with the American way.

A quick look across the nation shows that a decent lifestyle is already far beyond reach for too many people. Homelessness exists in each of the 50 states, and is found in both urban and suburban areas. The U.S. poverty rate is 13.4 percent (43 million people), while the uninsured rate is 13.7 percent. More immigration creates more competition for jobs and requires costly social services. While the U.S. can respond to many needs at one time, we’re failing on addressing homelessness, so adding more immigrants to the mix is the last thing that homeless, poor and uninsured people need.

Proponents for lower immigration levels have more persuasive, fact-based arguments for reducing the U.S. legal immigrant flow. With a population of 329 million and the world’s largest economy, the U.S. ecological footprint exceeds its biocapacity, meaning that the country has an ecological deficit – by definition, an unsustainable living pattern. Instead, the U.S. is in a continuous overshoot status, which means residents use up more natural resources in about seven months than can be replaced in a single year.

Immigration and births to immigrants represent, according to the Census Bureau, population growth’s primary driver. Like all Americans, new immigrants need housing, transportation, jobs and education. But immigration has been so high for so long that the U.S. has undergone a major land development transformation. From 1982 to 2010, sprawl paved over 65 million square miles, including 14 percent of America’s cropland. The total square miles lost to development represents an area equivalent to Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware, New York and Pennsylvania combined.

Sprawl continues to contribute to major land loss and ruin. The historically devastating Houston floods that Hurricane Harvey created two years ago were facilitated by the urbanization of about 25,000 swampland acres that a 42 percent population growth between 1995 and 2015 necessitated. Between 2017 and 2018, greater Houston’s population grew by 91,689, the nation’s third largest increase, to nearly 7 million. And there’s no sign of a slowdown.

The U.S. has moved far away from its traditional immigration totals. Between 1776 and 1965, annual immigration averaged 250,000 people per year. But ill-advised and shortsighted congressionally approved changes to immigration laws in the 1950s, 1960s and 1990s sent totals into orbit. To call for higher immigration intake is irresponsible and uninformed.

A single annual immigrant intake doesn’t represent the whole picture. Chain migration allows naturalized anchor immigrants to sponsor for permanent residence their adult children, adult siblings who in turn can then bring in their adult children who in turn do the same, and thereby continue the chain literally forever. Southeast Asian war refugees in the chain are still sponsoring relatives today even though the conflict ended 45 years ago.

Calling for less immigration isn’t anti-immigrant, but rather a reality check that sustainability is at stake for future generations. Americans, weary of sprawl and aware of the growth that surrounds them, want immigration reduced. They have actively, but unsuccessfully, pressed Congress to pass legislation that would reduce immigration.

Neither Congress nor the immigration lobby disputes the population growth projections. Yet, to the inevitable detriment of all, nothing changes.

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

The Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act (FHSI), the 2019 version, has been reintroduced in the Senate, S. 386, and in the House, H.R. 1044. Mike Lee (R-Utah) introduced the Senate version. Overall, Lee has a strong immigration record, but on reducing unnecessary employment-based visas, Lee’s voting record is abysmal.

In 2015, Lee cosponsored the disastrous, and thankfully failed, I-Squared Act which would have increased by 100,000 the H-1B visa cap. U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) introduced H.R. 1044, which in a previous House version was H.R. 104. Lofgren is the notoriously awful, vigorously anti-U.S. tech worker, H-1B advocate who, in her 25-year congressional career, has voted more than 30 times to increase high- and low-skilled visas.

Such is the nature of bad immigration bills like FHSI. They fail to advance, as did FHSI in the 115th and earlier sessions, but then instantly reappear when a new Congress convenes. This time around the danger is that FHSI is gaining momentum. Since Congress disappointingly remains strongly anti-American worker, and is especially eager to issue more employment-based visas, the awful, virtually identical immigration bills of Lee and Lofgren might become law.

Lee’s Senate version has 31 cosponsors, including 17 Republicans who are confirmed H-1B supporters. The House version has 291 cosponsors, mostly Democrats, and has been referred to the Subcommittee on Immigration and Citizenship. Both bills increase the per-country cap on family-based immigrant visas from 7 percent of the total number of such visas available in a single year to 15 percent, and eliminate the 7 percent cap for employment-based visas.

According to a USCIS insider, if the per-country cap were lifted, then for the next 10 years, nearly all of the Green Cards in the ordinary professional worker category would go to Indian nationals. Other companies that want to sponsor workers from the other more than 150 countries that receive employment Green Cards would have to wait at least a decade.

Passing these devoid-of-American-worker-protection bills – as employers, ethnic lobbyists, the American Immigration Lawyers Association and congressional sellouts urge – would allow an unjust system to continue unabated. Dozens of callous corporations that are pushing for the Lee/Lofgren bills have fired U.S. tech workers, and are now screaming about a nonexistent worker shortage.

Dan Rather is one of a growing number of journalists who have reported about H-1B fraud. In his series, “Jobless in America,” Rather did several hard-hitting pieces on the H-1B and other employment-based visas that have undermined experienced, talented American workers.

Rather emphasized that tech giants falsely represent American women, students, minorities and older workers as unqualified to distract public attention from their discriminatory recruiting and hiring practices. Rather explained to his unsuspecting public that “H-1B nondependent employers are not subject to the conditions [seeking U.S. workers first] and their H-1B workers may be hired even when a qualified U.S. worker wants the job, and a U.S. worker can be displaced from the job in favor of the foreign worker.”

Since the Immigration Act of 1990 created the H-1B visa, tech giants and other billion-dollar corporations have dishonestly and disingenuously claimed, as Rather documented, that American women, U.S. students, minorities, and older workers as unqualified to distract public attention from their discriminatory recruiting and hiring practices. The Lee-Zofgren bills will serve to continue to push out thousands of U.S. tech workers, and then their employers will callously force them to train, at risk of losing their severance, their foreign national replacements.

After more than a quarter of a century of steady U.S. worker displacement via the H-1B, Congress needs to refocus its priorities on protecting the future of Americans and their families. Ignoring immigration legislation’s effect on native-born, as Congress has done for nearly three decades, is unconscionable, and must be reversed.

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

During World War II, of the 500-plus MLB players who served, only two young Americans were killed.

Captain Elmer Gedeon, with the USAAF’s 86th Bomb Squadron, was shot down on April 20, 1944, over Saint-Pol, France. U.S. Marine Corps First Lieutenant Harry O’Neill lost his life on March 6, 1945, after being hit by Japanese sniper fire on Iwo Jima. O’Neill was one of 92 4th Marine Division officers that died on Iwo Jima. The invaluable website Baseballinwartime.com has more than 500 stories about baseball players from all levels who participated in the nation’s great wars.

Gedeon and O’Neill were outstanding young men, their parents’ pride and joy, admired in their communities and beloved by all. Graduates of the University of Michigan and Gettysburg College, respectively, Gedeon and O’Neill had wonderful futures – although perhaps not in the major leagues. Their experiences in the bigs were limited. In 1939, Gedeon played outfield during five games for the Washington Senators, and came to bat five times with one hit. O’Neill, a catcher, appeared in one game for the 1939 Philadelphia Athletics, but had no plate appearances.

During their college years, Gedeon and O’Neill were superstar athletes who dominated in multiple sports. The 6-foot-4, 200-pound Gedeon excelled at baseball and track for the Wolverines. But ultimately, Gedeon cast his lot with baseball, and signed a contract with the Senators.

Gedeon’s minor league performances impressed Senators’ manager Bucky Harris, but he received his military summons in January 1941. Navigating a B-52 in 1942 on a North Carolina training flight, Gedeon’s plane crashed and burst into flames, killing two. Gedeon freed himself from the wreckage, and badly injured he returned to save his fellow pilots still trapped inside. While on his last leave, Gedeon promised his cousin that he would “be back in baseball” when the war ended. But on Gedeon’s thirteenth B-26 European bombing mission, five days after his 27th birthday, anti-aircraft fire hit his plane, killing him and five others.

At Gettysburg, O’Neill starred on the gridiron, the hardcourt and the baseball diamond. Connie Mack’s Philadelphia A’s signed O’Neill, a 6-foot-3 catcher, and he spent the 1939 season as the team’s third string-catcher. During the ninth inning of a July 23, 16-3 drubbing at the Detroit Tigers’ hands, Mack inserted O’Neill into the lineup as a defensive replacement, but he never got a turn at bat. After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, O’Neill’s life changed forever. O’Neill enlisted in the Marines, and graduated from Quantico as a second lieutenant. His next stop was Camp Pendleton, California, and, now a first lieutenant in the Fourth Marine Division, he was shipped out to the Pacific Theater on January 13, 1944. After landing on Iwo Jima on February 19, 1945, and moving slowly inward, the Marines were under intense, nonstop fire. By day’s end, March 6, 28-year-old O’Neill was dead.

In her letter, O’Neill’s mother Susanna wrote that upon learning of Harry’s heroic death the sadness in her heart grew deeper as each day passed: “Harry was always so full of life, that it seems hard to think that he’s gone.” O’Neill was buried at the Iwo Jima cemetery where 7,000 Marines were also laid to rest. In July 1947, O’Neill’s remains were returned to the United States and buried at Arlington Cemetery in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania.

For their valor and selfless dedication to their fellow soldiers, Gedeon was awarded the Soldier’s Medal and the Purple Heart; O’Neill, the Purple Heart. On Memorial Day, as America honors Gedeon, O’Neill and other fallen heroes, remember these words from Ecclesiasticus 44:14: “Their bodies are buried in peace; but their name liveth for evermore.”

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

Better late than never – words that apply to Sen. Lindsey Graham’s new bill that calls for a major overhaul in the nation’s antiquated laws that have created a porous border.

Congress has known for at least a decade that current border regulations are toothless, and have created what Graham called a “perfect storm.” In April, immigration officials detained about 100,000 migrants, and the Department of Homeland Security projects that total border apprehensions will reach one million during fiscal year 2019.

To end the current practice of Central American nationals from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador coming to the U.S. with a child, which may or may not belong to the adult traveler, and then turning themselves over to Border Patrol to start the asylum process, Graham’s legislation has four major objectives.

First, Northern Triangle asylum applications would be filed at a local Central American processing center or in Mexico, not the U.S. Second, if held in the U.S., the maximum time period a family could be detained would increase from 20 days as per the outdated Flores Settlement to 100 days. Third, 500 new immigration judges would be appointed to reduce the backlog of cases, about 875,000 strong. And fourth, unaccompanied minors from noncontiguous countries would be processed in the same manner as thosefrom Mexico and Canada, and could therefore if appropriate be safely and humanely returned to their home.

Should Graham’s bill become law – unlikely in the current toxic congressional atmosphere – it would have immediate and long-term benefits. Tighter border laws would end what is essentially a shameful U.S. human trafficking subsidy. Few are more aware of the ease of entry across the border than the coyotes and cartels. And getting north is not always about pursuing the Great American Dream.

According to the United Nations Global Report on Trafficking in Persons, at the end of a treacherous 2,000-mile journey from Central America, the migrants are too often subjected to inhumane labor conditions and sexual exploitation. Migration advocates are fond of saying that slowing the Central American flow is “not who we are.” But enabling criminal trafficking enterprises that exploit defenseless women and children, the current practice that congressional inaction encourages, is most definitely not who we are.

Catch and release will negatively affect the jobs market, K-12 school systems and hospitals. After six months, Central American asylum seekers qualify for work authorization documents, and will likely enter the labor market. Since most are unskilled and have limited English, they’ll seek employment in the service industry at hotels, restaurants and in maintenance where they will compete directly with lower-income and American minorities for increasingly scarce jobs. Artificial intelligence and large immigration surges are bad for U.S. workers, especially for less-skilled Americans.

The migrant children will need to attend already overcrowded public schools. Once enrolled, the students will need English language instruction, and other special services that their traumatic journey necessitates. These costly services strain the already overburdened school budgets, and put extra demands on teachers. Hospital overcrowding may be more dire than the public school enrollment crisis. Since they might have medical conditions that have gone untreated for years, newly arrived migrants may need ongoing medical attention.

While Congress has debated border security for decades, little is said about the aftermath once the migrants enter the U.S. interior – what effect will they have on the U.S. labor market, how many new schools and hospitals must be built, and how will they be paid for? These are questions that serious leaders would ask and answer, but that Congress refuses to address.

Border security and protecting Americans’ well-being in the employment market, education and health care shouldn’t be partisan issues. But, on immigration, rancor reigns supreme while the nation’s best interests are ignored.

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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].

White House senior advisor Jared Kushner’s immigration plan is a direct threat to thousands of U.S. workers with white-collar jobs.

Kushner’s vision, which he’s worked on for months and developed under the false pretense that the nation has a dire labor shortage, would emphasize skilled labor but would further displace American workers. U.S. workers, especially in the tech field, have been fighting an uphill battle to retain their jobs since the Immigration Act of 1990 which created the H-1B and other employment-based visas.

The H-1B and its job-killing cousin, the L-1, which facilitates overseas intra-company transfers of questionable value, have destroyed entire domestic IT departments. Case in point: Siemens ICN fired its well-educated, experienced tech department, forced them to retrain their South Asian replacements, and paid the ousted employees a pittance as severance.

In his letter to the Wall Street Journal, Mike Emmons, a fired Siemens tech worker, related his personal anguish when he realized that he was being replaced by a younger, less-skilled, less-experienced but cheaper foreign-born worker. Hilarie Gamm, author of “Billions Lost” and a 25-year tech veteran, said Congress’ mission should be to retain American workers, not accelerate their demise with H-1Bs and other job displacement visas.

For decades, myriad visas have steadily eroded American middle-class jobs, and kept downward pressure on U.S. wages. At least a dozen visas allow employers to hire white-collar immigrants to work in jobs that require a college degree, often for lower salaries.

To immigrants striving to stay in the U.S., the Green Card lure is more powerful than money. As for those recent college graduates who have invested a small fortune in the diplomas they hope will help them land a high-paying job, they’re simply out of luck. In recent years, the maneuvers ‒ legal but questionable ‒ to undermine American kids have mushroomed.

The Curricular Practical Training program provides one-year work permits to foreign students enrolled in U.S. colleges. In 2017, 132,796 foreigners held CPT work permits, according to federal data. The CPT program works in concert with the Optional Practical Training program, another work permit vehicle. OPT allows foreign graduates of U.S. universities to work up to three years, in the U.S. In 2017, 291,635 foreigner nationals received, one-year OPT work permits,, and another 60,410 were given three-year OPT work permits. In the two prior years, 67,000 people were issued three-year OPT permits. Some now work at Amazon, Intel, Microsoft and other coveted employment destinations.

Kushner didn’t solicit the many stories of displaced Americans. Instead, he sought the perspectives of big business. Unfortunately, Kushner’s sympathies may align more with cheap labor-addicted employers than with recently displaced Americans. A few years ago, Kushner shamelessly built a luxury Jersey City riverfront skyscraper with federal EB-5 funds intended for economically distressed areas. The immigration accord that President Trump authorized Kushner to negotiate has given Kushner a chance to cozy up to industry titans.

The fraud-ridden EB-5 Kushner took advantage of is scorned everywhere except on Capitol Hill where Congress refuses to kill it, and except among the lucky 9,000 recipients, up from 64 in 2003, who write a check, then get a visa, and bring family along for the ride. A Washington Post editorial, “An Immigration Policy Worth Ending,” states that the EB-5 “has created a lot of jobs for consultants, lawyers and lobbyists, who get paid to entice wealthy foreigners into applying for the visas, and to persuade Congress to renew it each year.”

Some good news about Kushner’s much ballyhooed immigration proposal. Republican senators gave Kushner’s plan the lukewarm reception it deserves, and Democrats will surely be unanimously opposed. President Trump’s goal should be to weed out CPT, OPT and other employment-based visas, while lowering the 1 million plus legal immigrants who arrive annually and receive lifetime-valid work authorization permits.

Americans overwhelmingly want less immigration; a Harvard-Harris poll found that 81 percent of voters want immigration cut from its current level, and 63 percent want to cut it by half. Those are the marching orders President Trump and Kushner should follow.

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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].

The immediacy of the U.S.-Mexico border emergency is shocking, almost unfathomable, as we appear to be on track to see as many as 1 million migrants during the current fiscal year, as former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said before her recent departure.

But after a decades-long history of inadequate border and interior enforcement, many Americans aren’t surprised that border patrol agents in March apprehended about 100,000 illegal aliens (up from 76,000 in February) that had crossed through Mexico. Over a longer timeframe, the totals will be even more dramatic. So when looking at the U.S. border crisis, driven mostly by Central American asylum seekers, the long view is more important than the short-term perspective.

Once migrants’ feet touch U.S. soil, the odds are prohibitively high that they’ll be released into the general population and remain forever. Nearly 100 percent of children and families detained at the border last year are still present. Before 2013, only 1 percent of migrants that arrived at the border sought asylum. The migrants simply have to utter the magic words, “credible fear,” and they’re given the keys to the kingdom. Although Congress has long been aware of this specific loophole, it has done nothing to eliminate it.

Here’s what today’s congressional inaction on Central American migration could mean. Since 1970 when the Central American population in the U.S. was 118,000, an estimated 3.3 million Central Americans, legal and illegal, now live in the U.S., a 28-fold surge in less than 50 years. This is a rate that’s six-times faster than overall immigrant population growth.

Factor in fertility rates for those coming from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, and a relatively young median age when migrants enter the U.S., and Central Americans will be significant contributors to growing the U.S. population for years to come. The Census Bureau identified immigration and births to immigrants as the major population driver that will swell U.S. residency by 75 million in 2060. More than 90 percent of the increase will be immigration-related.

Once migrants attain lawful permanent residency, they can petition certain family members. The average number of sponsored immigrants is 3.5 per family, according to a Princeton University analysis. The data isn’t necessarily precise, but it provides ballpark estimates, and the population projections are frightening.

Newcomers will require roads, housing, schools and hospitals ‒ infrastructure that’s currently in various stages of disrepair or dysfunction. Just as Congress has failed to meaningfully address the Central American border surge, so also has it done too little to update our infrastructure. Coincidental to border news, President Trump met with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to discuss infrastructure, and the budget for the necessary improvements. The White House and Democratic leadership agreed that the overhaul would require $2 trillion. But $2 trillion is catch-up money. By 2060, when the huge projected population increases are a reality, another round of trillion-dollar funding will be needed.

Congress’ border security failures represent a complete abdication of the members’ sworn duty to defend the U.S. and its citizens. The Senate and the House have the RAISE Act before them that would, among other immigration improvements, eliminate extended family migration. Congress also could at any time introduce and pass other legislation to restore sanity to the nation’s reckless and destructive immigration laws.

Whether Congress will act, however, is a completely different matter.

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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].

Just days before Congress adjourned for its spring recess, Capitol Hill rumors circulated that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Francis Cissna was in the departure lounge, soon to be removed. Since Trump fired Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Secret Service Director Randolph Alles, gossip-crazed Washington expected the unpredictable president would soon wield his axe on Cissna.

But Cissna keeps on task, and is making admirable strides toward defending U.S. tech workers and helping them keep their jobs. Although Cissna has no control over the H-1B 85,000 annual cap that has displaced thousands of Americans and blocked thousands more, especially recent university graduates, from pursuing well-paid tech careers, the employment-based visa, created as part of the Immigration Act of 1990, is his primary target for reform. The H-1B has become a giant fraud perpetrated on the American public and on a shamefully gullible Congress.

Despite Congress’ and Silicon Valley’s intense, well-funded resistance to President Trump’s “Buy American and Hire American” executive order, under Cissna’s guidance nearly a third of H-1B visa petitions have been denied so far in fiscal year 2019. Disgruntled feedback from employers and immigration lawyers that the coveted visa is becoming harder to obtain is actually a ringing endorsement for Cissna’s effectiveness. In FY 2018, USCIS denied 24 percent of petitions; the agency rejected only 5 percent in FY 2012. USCIS has also issued Requests for Evidence (RFEs) in 60 percent of all petitions submitted. USCIS uses RFEs for a variety of reasons, including when it’s unclear that a position qualifies as a specialty occupation or when the validity of the employer-employee relationship has not been established.

The hardest hit by scrutiny are the worst actors. Consulting companies that send H-1B holders to a third-party site saw significant denial increases. Equally comforting to advocates that defend U.S. tech workers is that trillion-dollar Amazon, and its multi-billion dollar, cheap-labor-addicted soulmates such as IBM, Google and Microsoft, have had their indentured servitude employment flow interrupted. For example, the denial rate for continuing employment petitions went from 1 percent in FY 2015 to 29 percent for FY 2019 at IBM.

As USCIS spokeswoman Jessica Collins said in an email to Bloomberg Law, the agency “has made a series of reforms designed to protect U.S. workers, increase our confidence in the eligibility of those who receive benefits, cut down on frivolous petitions, and improve the integrity and efficiency of the immigration petition process.” Collins reminded USCIS critics that the responsibility is “incumbent upon the petitioner, not the government, to demonstrate that he or she meets the eligibility under the law for a desired immigration benefit.”

Assuming that President Trump was sincere when he signed his 2017 pro-U.S. worker executive order – and serious reservations about his commitment have arisen – then Cissna is the best friend he has. On behalf of America and American workers, Cissna is on record as an enforcer of immigration laws as defined by the Immigration and Nationality Act. Moreover, Cissna opposes giving work authorization to H-1B spouses, H-4s. Work authorization to H-4s was given by executive order under the Obama administration, circumventing Congress.

Best of all, Cissna has said he hopes to see the day that Congress would write a one-sentence provision that would prohibit H-1B workers from displacing Americans. Based on his commitment to U.S. workers, Cissna should be allowed to continue to serve.

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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].

Just a few brief weeks into the 2019 Major League Baseball season, incontrovertible evidence has surfaced that computerized balls and strike calls cannot be far away. Before each game begins, the announcers offer their insights into the home plate umpire’s leanings: he’ll allow the low or the high strike. Then throughout the game, with the strike zone superimposed on the screen, the announcers unload, and make critical comments such as last innings strike is now this innings ball. Although baseball purists will bemoan robotics’ arrival, it’s inevitable.

But baseball bugs can be thankful that computers were still a fantasy in 1956 when the New York Yankees’ Don Larsen pitched his perfect game against the Brooklyn Dodgers. Replays show that Larsen’s final pitch to pinch hitter Dale Mitchell was high and away. To mark the MLB Network’s 10th anniversary, Bob Costas hosted Larsen and his catcher Yogi Berra for the historic game’s inning-by-inning analysis that led up to home plate umpire Babe Pinelli’s controversial strike three call.

Only two close fielding plays jeopardized Larsen’s perfect game bid. In the second inning, the Dodgers’ Jackie Robinson hit a scorcher that deflected off Yankees third baseman Andy Carey and into shortstop Gil McDougald’s glove. McDougald’s throw to first baseman Joe Collins beat the aging 37-year-old Robinson by a split second. Then, in the fifth, center fielder Mickey Mantle ran down a long Gil Hodges shot that would easily have gotten past slower outfielders. Otherwise, Larsen mowed down the powerful Dodgers’ lineup.

When the video clip reached inning nine, Costas asked Larsen what his emotions were as he walked to the mound. Larsen’s reply: “The wonder is that I didn’t faint.” But Larsen easily retired the first two batters. Carl Furillo flied out to Hank Bauer, then Roy Campanella grounded out to Billy Martin. Finally, Mitchell took a called third strike. The debate continues today about whether Pinelli got it right.

For starters, since Mitchell rarely fanned – only 119 strike outs in 3,984-career at bats, a nearly infallible record – it’s unlikely he’d leave his bat on his shoulder during a crucial two-strike plate appearance. Throughout his life, Mitchell insisted that Larsen’s pitch was off the plate. But after the game, Pinelli, whose vision tested at 20/20, said that “Larsen hit the corner of the plate with a beautiful fast ball…an easy call.” Larsen’s teammates, however, agreed with Mitchell. From third base, Carey said Larsen’s pitch was “high,” McDougald, “not even close,” and Mantle, “looked outside.” No matter, without a robot to interfere with baseball history, Larsen’s perfect game is in the record book forever.

Postscripts on the four protagonists. After 42 years in baseball that included umping six world series, Pinelli retired following the Yankees 1956 seven-game win, and died at age 82. Pinelli earned his peers’ universal admiration and the players’ respect – “the Lou Gehrig of umpires,” as he was referred to.

Mitchell’s strike out represented his last at bat. Eagle-eyed Mitchell compiled a .312 lifetime batting average, then went into the oil business where he prospered. In 1986, the 30th anniversary of the perfect game, “Good Morning America” invited Larsen, Berra and Mitchell to appear on the show. Mitchell refused, and suggested that anyone who expects him to travel across the country to talk about striking out should have his head examined. Mitchell died in 1987, age 65.

Berra, who passed in 2015, told Costas that Larsen never shook him off and that, away from his pitcher’s line of vision, Whitey Ford furiously warmed up during the final innings.

Today, Larsen lives in Idaho where he said he thinks about his perfect game “many times” each day. In all, Larsen won four World Series games; two more for the Yankees in 1957 and 1958 against the Milwaukee Braves, and, in 1962 for the San Francisco Giants against the Yankees. In 2012, Larsen sold his #18 perfect game uniform for $756,000.

The most enjoyable moment in the MLB film is the unabashed joyous look that washed over Larsen’s face when the image of Berra rushing out to embrace him flashed on the screen. More than 60 years later, Larsen relived his perfect moment as if it happened yesterday.

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Joe Guzzardi is a Society for American Baseball Research member. Contact him at [email protected].

Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson’s daughter Tia recently said that her father would be “deeply distressed” by the lack of progress on the environmental causes that he held dear, and advocated for throughout his life.

Little wonder that the former Wisconsin U.S. senator and governor would be so disappointed. In 1970, the first year that Earth Day was celebrated, the U.S. population stood at 203 million; today it’s 329 million. The year Nelson was born, 1916, the domestic population was about 95 million; when he died in 2005, nearly 300 million people inhabited the U.S.

Population growth from the global perspective is even more alarming. On the first Earth Day, the population was 3.7 million; today, it’s more than doubled to 7.7 billion, and the Population Reference Bureau (PRB) projects that with its rapid daily net growth, global population could reach 9.9 billion by 2050, an alarming 33 percent increase over today’s level.

In an extensive interview granted to NBC News, Ms. Nelson said that her father’s Earth Day concept had been successful beyond his “wildest dreams” and the personal impact it had on so many was tremendous. All well and good, according to Ms. Nelson, but not nearly enough.

Too many clean energy and land use improvements have slipped away, says Nelson, identifying state and federal leaders who have dropped the environmental ball. Nelson called out Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney and John McCain, all prominent Republican leaders who once said that climate change puts the environment at risk.

And unlike the first Earth Day, when Congress was given the day off to contemplate the event’s importance, discussion of population growth too is a taboo, suppressed subject on Capitol Hill even among those who may have acknowledged it a decade ago. Most curious is that anyone who works in D.C. or frequents the Beltway is no doubt keenly aware of what overpopulation has wrought.

A study found that D.C. traffic ranks as the nation’s second worst, just behind Los Angeles, and is therefore a major contributor to carbon emissions. Logic dictates that given the gridlock that surrounds D.C., Congress should prioritize an intelligent discussion of how to prevent further highway and inner-city congestion. But, alas, since such a debate would involve stemming population growth and reducing immigration, Congress refuses to engage.

Despite its impact on every community and every family’s well-being, population growth remains mostly under the radar. Nevertheless, some strides toward sustainability have been made.

PRB found that globally 62 percent of married women between the ages 15 and 49 use contraception, and 56 percent use modern methods like the pill or, intrauterine devices. On the downside, birth control is actively practiced in wealthy, more well educated countries like Norway, and less so in poorer nations like South Sudan. About 60 percent of all U.S. reproductive age women currently use contraception.

By 2050, many of the active populationists now among us will have passed away; none will still be around in 2100. But our children and grandchildren will be, and for that reason if no other Congress should be pressed hard to initiate a population sustainability dialogue.

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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].