Cagle World

On Election Day, Pennsylvanians will face an important moment of truth in the race for U.S. Senate. Voters will choose between the ineffectual two-term Democratic incumbent Bob Casey or his Republican U.S. House of Representatives challenger, four-term Lou Barletta.,

Campaigns for high office feature embellished achievements and lofty promises for what the candidates will accomplish for their constituents. Forget the bluster. Look instead at the congressional voting records of Casey and Barletta. They reveal everything that Pennsylvanians need to know, the bad for Casey; the good for Barletta.,

Casey portrays himself as a defender of American workers. But his voting pattern consistently proves that Casey has no interest in American workers’ well-being, but instead prefers to replace hard-working Americans with overseas workers via various employment-based visas, and amnesties that would provide the recipients with employment authorization documents. Visa holders and amnestied immigrants can then enter the U.S. labor market and compete head-to-head in a tough job environment with American citizens.,

This year, Casey voted in favor of two separate amendments – one introduced by Senators Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Susan Collins (R-ME), Mike Rounds (R-SD) and Angus King (I-ME), and the second by Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Chris Coons (D-DE) – that would have granted amnesties to millions of illegally present immigrants.,

In 2015, 2017 and again this year, Casey voted to increase the H-2–guest worker totals. The H-2–is a nonagriculture, temporary visa designed for seasonal employers and is used in landscaping, the leisure industry and other businesses for jobs that American teens and college students historically sought out to earn college tuition money.,

On border and interior enforcement, Casey has a poor record. In 2015, during the unprecedented Central American border surge, Casey voted against an amendment that called for the expedited removal of Salvadoran, Guatemalan and Honduran aliens who are now, presumably, living in the U.S. interior and unlikely ever to go home. Casey also voted against fellow Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey’s bill to defund sanctuary cities, municipalities that refuse to cooperate with Immigration and Customs officials, and instead release convicted criminal aliens back into local communities.,

Compare Casey’s disappointing record on subverting American workers, leaving America’s border and interior vulnerable, and endorsing the release of violent criminal aliens to Barletta’s.,

During the current Congress, Barletta voted four times to mandate E-Verify, the federal program that ensures every new employee is legally authorized to work in the U.S. Barletta cosponsored four bills, and voted in favor of two other bills, that would have defunded sanctuary cities.,

Moreover, Barletta cosponsored legislation that would reduce amnesties, control border surges, end asylum fraud and close loopholes in asylum claims. Asylum fraud is a grave concern to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Importantly, after asylees win their case or 180 days pass without a decision, they automatically become work authorized.,

As for which candidate is the tougher fighter, remember that in 2006, as Hazelton’s mayor, Barletta stood up to the ACLU and the Puerto Rican Legal Defense fund when they challenged his Illegal Immigration Relief Act that allowed the city to deny business permits to employers who hire illegal immigrants and gave the city authority to fine landlords up to $1,000 for renting to illegal immigrants.,

A Federal District Court, and then a U.S. Appeals court, ruled against Barletta, shameless judicial activism run amok. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court did not take up the case, and Hazelton had to reimburse the ACLU $1.4, million, despite that aiding and abetting illegal immigrants – hiring and providing shelter to them – is a federal felony.,

On November 6, American voters will decide whether to reward obstructionist, expansionist, ultra-liberals like Casey with another undeserved six years or send pro-U.S. worker, pro-American values candidates like Barletta to the U.S. Senate. The nation’s future hangs in the balance.

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Joe Guzzardi is a nationally syndicated, Pittsburgh-based columnist who has written about government for more than 30 years. Contact Joe at [email protected].

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As the latest Central American caravan presses North, it grows in size, and as of Monday reached more than 7,000-strong. Whether 700 or 7,000 migrants ever enter the U.S., their presence would be bad for almost everyone, including many migrants, which I’ll explain later. “Winners” would be the immigration lawyers and cheap labor employers. Losers would be the unemployed and underemployed Americans, especially minorities; the social service providers, already overburdened, and U.S. taxpayers who must fund this tremendous resettlement.

For days, hundreds of Central Americans, mostly Honduran women, children and young men under age 35, have fearlessly, often aggressively, crossed immigration checkpoints, military bases and police in their organized march toward the U.S.

In a departure from form, Mexico has made some effort to slow the caravan, and Mexican officials made arrests in Ciudad Hidalgo, a Mexican border town. Among those detained was the director of the open border group Pueblo Sin Fronteras. On the whole, however, Mexico has allowed most to proceed without intervention.

The argument over whether the migrants should be admitted on humanitarian grounds or denied in order to preserve a semblance of common sense in the nation’s immigration laws fails to consider the long view: what happens to the Central Americans after they’re released into the United States? History shows that once prior caravan participants reached the U.S. interior, they’re here for good. In May, a caravan made it into the U.S. Caravan members applied for asylum and were released into the general population.

Permanent presence in the U.S., legal or illegal, means that migrants will need jobs to sustain themselves. Profiled by The New York Times and the Associated Press, the migrants all noted that their main objective is to find employment. According to the Times, one migrant after another told reporters that they’re seeking trabajo – work – in construction, restaurants, landscaping or cleaning. But being unemployed back home or seeking the proverbial better life doesn’t qualify as a valid asylum claim. Proof: when they reach immigration court, most asylum claims are denied. In 2016, Mexico’s denial rate was 89.6 percent; El Salvador, 82.9 percent; Honduras, 80.3 percent and Guatemala, 77.2 percent.

As for the migrants, imagine that a lifelong resident of Honduras eventually reached Los Angeles or any other major metropolis, 3,000 miles from his home, family, friends, language and customs. Major U.S. cities are completely beyond anything the migrant had ever imagined, a new and baffling world. Since only Central American elites speak English or have marketable skills, newly arrived migrants are often economically forced into menial jobs and subject to criminal wage exploitation. A study by the National Employment Law Project found that 37 percent of illegal immigrant workers are wage exploitation victims. An even higher 84 percent were not paid overtime when they worked more than 40 hours.

The McKinsey Global Institute projects that in 2020 relative to the available number of jobs, there could be 6 million Americans without a high school diploma who won’t,be able to find employment. Even if McKinsey has overestimated the number, the U.S. has no need for more low-skilled labor that the caravan is bringing.

Congress has repeatedly failed to eliminate the loopholes that allow illegal immigrants to make asylum claims that lead to their release. The negative consequences include an expansion of the lower end of the labor market and vulnerable American workers are made even more so. Luma Simms, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, once asked if immigration is good for immigrants. Her answer: the best thing for immigrants comes when the U.S. does everything it can to “give immigrants and refugees a future and a hope in their own lands.”

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

World Series managers Dave Roberts and Alex Cora have novel pre-game calculations to ponder. The Los Angeles Dodgers and Boston Red Sox pilots have been in consultation with their pitching coaches, in-house sabermetric gurus and other baseball experts to determine if they should go with new-fangled openers or traditional starters. If the former, how long should he go – one or two batters or one or two innings? If the latter, dare the manager hope for four innings, maybe five?

Back in 1903, when the first-ever World Series was played between the h-less Pittsburg Pirates and the Boston Americans, no such deliberations were necessary. Managers Fred Clarke, Pirates, and Jimmy Collins, Red Sox, simply gave the bulb, as baseballs were called in the early 1900s, to their starters, and then took a seat at the end of the bench. The best of nine series that stretched from October 1 and October 13 – because of rain outs and travel days – and which Boston won, 5-3, included 13 complete games. More remarkably, the Pirates’ Deacon Phillippe fired five of them. To put the magnitude of Phillippe’s five complete games in a nine-game series in perspective, consider that the 2018 complete game leaders during a 162-game season were tied with two.

Baseball bugs wildly anticipated the initial World Series showdown between the traditional National League Pirates and the nascent Red Sox, playing in only their third season. Overflow crowds packed Boston’s Huntington Grounds and Pittsburg’s Exposition Park. Because the Pirates had the lumber and were led by Hall of Fame greats shortstop Honus Wager, 16 seasons of .300 or better batting averages, and player-manager Clarke, a career .312 hitter, the Bucs were heavy favorites. In pre-World Series 1902, the Pirates lost a mere 23 games.

But the Red Sox had weapons, too. On the mound would be three 20-game winners. Cy Young, Bill Dineen and Tom Hughes who racked up 1903 records of, respectively, 28-9, 21-13 and 20-7. Although Young and Dineen dazzled and were credited with all five Red Sox wins, the big story now lost in time was the Pirates’ Phillippe. Pittsburg’s pitching staff, thinned out by the losses of starters Sam Leever, a 25-game winner, to a trapshooting accident and Ed Doheny to a mental collapse that led to his lifetime institutionalization forced the Pirates to turn to workhorse Phillippe.

In the opener, Phillippe outdueled his more famous foe Young, 7-3. Then, in games two and three, Phillippe prevailed 4-2 and 5-4. In games seven and eight, however, Phillippe took 7-3 and 3-0 losses. During his 44-innings pitched, Phillippe walked only three batters.

Phillippe was the greatest control pitcher ever – his 1.25 walks per nine innings is the lowest ratio of anyone who hurled after the modern pitching distance was increased from 50 feet to 60 feet, six inches. Although Phillippe was a six-time 20-game winner, never had a losing season, and won 189 games in a 13-year major league career that didn’t begin until he was nearly 27 years old, the Hall of Fame passed him by. Instead, Phillippe settled for Pittsburgh fans electing him the team’s best-ever right-handed pitcher.

During the 1903 series, the shortest game was 1:30; the longest, 2:00. The games’ briefness is attributable to few walks and only three pitching changes. Compare that to the just concluded National League Championship Series that included a staggering 72 pitching changes and games that exceeded four hours. The relief pitcher parade isn’t always successful. But for viewers, it’s a sure-fire snore. When the regular season rolls around in 2019, expect fewer fans at the park and in front of their televisions. Excessively long games are, by definition, boring.

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

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The headline financial news story of late is Verizon’s announcement that it offered a voluntary severance package to about 44,000 employees, or about one-third of its workforce. But the subtitle is equally disturbing. Verizon will transfer more than 2,500 jobs – some insiders peg the total at closer to 5,000 – to India-based Infosys as part of a $700 million outsourcing agreement. Thousands who were once Verizon employees will soon work for Infosys.

IT analysts know that Infosys has a history of eliminating benefits which transferred employees enjoyed and that the company will eventually displace them with lower cost Indian nationals. Verizon is candid about its goals if not its methods: by 2021, the wireless carrier hopes to slash $10 billion from its total $114 billion debt load.

Outsourcing is an American worker job killer. A Deloitte Global Outsourcing survey conducted this year found that many corporations use, or are about to use, outsourcing. The official corporate excuse is that outsourcing makes their operations more flexible, a vague and difficult-to-prove claim. Known for certain, however, is that outsourcing means lower labor costs for the employer. A General Accounting Office report showed that a majority of H-1–visa holders fall into the lowest of four categories, while only 6 percent are included among the higher skilled, and therefore more well-paid groups.

Beyond the IT and immigration worlds, little is known about Infosys. In a nutshell, Infosys uses the H-1–visa to hire Indian engineers and programmers, then assigns them to American firms that falsely claim they cannot find Americans to fill their employment needs. Subsequently, many of the jobs initially filled in the U.S. are reassigned in India. With that well-established pattern in mind, Infosys’ ballyhooed commitment to hire 10,000 Americans in Indiana by 2021 must be viewed with extreme skepticism. Infosys’ promise is more likely a decoy in response to President Trump’s 2017,”Buy American and Hire American” executive order.

Inarguably, Infosys has a well-established track record of taking advantage of loose U.S. federal immigration laws to enhance its already substantial $11 billion bottom line. About 60 percent of Infosys’ revenue is generated in North America where the company employs more than 20,000 workers, mainly Indians on H-1–visas. Beyond its dubious H-1–visa practices, Infosys was caught red-handed importing workers on B-1 visas allegedly to attend business conferences or training sessions. In fact, the B-1 holders ended up employed, an immigration status that the visa specifically excludes.

In 2013, Infosys paid $34 million in a civil settlement with the Justice Department and other federal agencies, which accused the company of systemic abuse of visa rules. Various other lawsuits filed against Infosys are currently pending, including two brought by former in-house lawyers. One litigant charged that Infosys is fundamentally an India-run corporate caste system and that “people who are not Indian are at the bottom.”

In 2016, then-Infosys Chief Executive Officer Vishal Sikka admitted that there is no shortage of U.S tech workers: “There are enough universities, enough ability to hire, enough ability to teach.” The abundant availability of American workers didn’t stop Infosys from tapping the foreign market while U.S. techies sat idle. Sikka’s statement and the GAO’s conclusion that significant reforms are badly needed in the H-1–visa program Congress created in 1990 have yielded little change. Although the federal government painstakingly goes out of its way to not publish foreign workers’ totals in the U.S., the investment bank Goldman Sachs estimates that the aggregate number is between 900,000 and one million.

That’s a million jobs that Americans have been denied, the incomes from which would have paid their mortgages, their children’s college tuitions, and bulked up their savings accounts.

Immigration’s original, noble but long-ago forgotten and still elusive purpose is to help Americans. At a minimum, immigration shouldn’t, as it does today, work against American citizens and its workers.

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

If I had a dollar for every time I heard someone say that he opposes illegal immigration, but supports legal immigration, I could take a nice vacation. Early in my three-decade career covering immigration, advocating for legal immigration was, if you will, the popular thing to do. Illegal immigrants were, as the story went, lawbreakers. On the other hand, legal immigrants were an American tradition, and therefore good.,

Problems surfaced however when analysts realized that during the past 30 years, legal immigration has continued – ballooned, really – unchecked. In the aggregate, since the late 1980s more than 30 million legal permanent residents have settled in the United States with no end in sight to this unsustainable population growth.,

Along with more legal immigration comes chain migration at the rate of almost four more legal immigrants per each original immigrant. To fully grasp the enormity of legal immigration now, compare today’s more than one million annual arrivals to the 40-year period that led up to the 1965 Immigration Act when the yearly legal permanent resident average intake hovered around 178,000.

While legal immigration has many downsides, one of the most dramatic is that it expands the labor pool. Lawful permanent residents are work authorized for life, and compete directly with citizens for employment. Consider the sobering fiscal year 2017 annual report from the Department of Homeland Security, which shows the federal government issued a staggering 1,127,167 green cards for the year – the third highest total in the last decade. In nine of the last ten years, the federal government has granted more than one million green cards.

The immigration subcategory totals also are overwhelming. More than 267,000 green cards were allotted to chain migration categories; that is, relatives other than spouses and minor children of citizens and lawful permanent residents. Eventually, chain migrants will petition their own family members to join them. Green cards to refugees, 120,356, hit a ten-year high. Since refugees can’t apply for green cards until they have been in the U.S. for at least a year, the total doesn’t reflect the actual number of refugees admitted.,

One more troubling statistic: the Congressional Research Service reported that in 2016 “employment-based admission has more than doubled from just over 400,000 in FY1994 to over one million in FY2014” and noted that many temporary guest worker programs “are not subject to any labor market tests.”,

Numerous other reports show how immigration has harmed American employment opportunities. From the Obama White House came the 2016 overview titled “The Long-Term Decline in Prime-Age Male Labor Force Participation.” An excerpt: “Foreign-born prime-age men continue to participate at higher rates than the native-born. Their [the foreign-born] participation rate has actually risen slightly over the last two decades by 1.4 percentage points since 1994, while the native-born prime-age male participation fell by 4.4 percentage points… “,

Examining a longer period, from 2000 through 2014’s first quarter, all of the net employment gains went to immigrant workers, while the native-born unemployed increased 17 million. Finally, from December 2007 through June 2015, all the net employment gains among women went to foreign-born. With immigration continuing at historically high levels, these disturbing trends are likely to continue unabated.,

My challenge to readers: Begin a worldwide search to find a nation that has immigration laws more hurtful to its native worker population than the U.S. Hint: none will be found.

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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].

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For baseball bugs, to use the 1900’s word for fans, October is the sweetest month – play in, play off, and eventually World Series games. Now, if only Alex Rodriguez went away, everything would be crackerjack.

Rodriguez, baseball’s most reviled player since Ty Cobb more than a century ago, has landed two primo broadcasting gigs, one announcing and one in-studio, at ESPN Sunday Night Baseball (SNCopyright and Fox Sports, respectively.

ESPN’s decision to hire Rodriguez is curious, to put it mildly. A bit of history: in 2015, ESPN summarily put the skids to former Philadelphia Phillies, Boston Red Sox and Arizona Diamondbacks pitching ace Curt Schilling. The reason: Schilling’s tweets which ESPN found offensive.

To replace Schilling, ESPN selected Jessica Mendoza, a stand-out Stanford University and Olympian softball hurler. But, since softball isn’t Major League Baseball, and Mendoza never racked up anything comparable to Schilling’s 216 big league wins, with an 11-2 post-season record that included the American League Division Championship’s most heroic efforts – the bloody foot game – many viewers rightly felt shortchanged.

Then, in 2018, ESPN reshuffled the SN–announcers’ roster again, kept Mendoza, and added Matt Vasgersian and Rodriguez. ESPN, having endured a long period of losing viewers, hemorrhaging money and slashing staff, committed a huge judgment error. Rewarding a cheater is unpopular among the majority of baseball fans, and their displeasure is reflected in SNB’s dramatic ratings decline. Sports Illustrated defined the viewer drop-off as “downright ugly.”

The qualified announcers’ pool is vast; choosing a dirty player makes no sense. Thirty ML–franchises have about 100 full- and part-time announcers who have outstanding ML–qualifications, earned on the up and up. Among them are the Oakland A’s Ray Fosse, the Atlanta Braves Don Sutton and the Pittsburgh Pirates Bob Walk, to name only a few. Despite what ESPN would like viewers to believe, Fosse, Sutton and Walk know as much about baseball as Rodriguez, and are less pompous.

Rodriguez’s baseball career was built in large part on PED cheating, then lying about it. Because of his role in the Biogenesis scandal, Rodriguez was suspended for 211 games, later reduced to 162 games.

As Rodriquez’s broadcast career evolves, another reason ESPN should torpedo him is abundantly clear -he’s a self-absorbed gas bag who struggles to get even the smallest detail correct. Mendoza can’t get a word in edgewise; she might as well return to Stanford. Media sources reported that Rodriquez unsuccessfully tried to put the skids to Mendoza who was in her contract’s last year.

Here are a few of the embarrassing blunders Rodriquez made during the National League wild card game between the Colorado Rockies and the Chicago Cubs. Rodriguez called Ian Desmond “Desmond Howard,” identified Rockies manager Bud Black as “Buddy Bell,” and branded Albert Almora Jr. by the last name of “Almonte.”

Let’s cut to the chase. The ML–Commissioner’s Office and individual teams’ front offices make the rote observation on exposed PED abusers that they have violated MLB’s drug policy. First-time offenders will receive an unpaid 80-game suspension – really 68 games since the players have 12 days to get in condition at a minor league.

But suspensions are less than a wrist slap compared to what the punishment should be. Pursuant to the Anabolic Steroid Control Act of 1990, PED’s illegal possession, distribution, sale and use are federal felonies that carry fines and jail sentences.

SNB’s audience want to enjoy late Sunday evening baseball before heading back to Monday drudgery. The last thing fans want is a three-hour, in-your-face reminder of Rodriguez, baseball’s most ignominious villain.

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

Although news unrelated to the Brett Kavanaugh-Christine Blasey Ford din was hard to find, last week swamp business continued as usual. And, sadly but not surprisingly, congressional American worker sellouts proceeded along an all-too-familiar path.

Last March, President Trump promised that he would never again sign a fiscally disastrous budget bill like the $1.3 trillion one he previously signed to, according to the president, protect the nation’s military and prevent a government shutdown. In remarks directed to Congress, President Trump said: “I will never sign another bill like this again. I’m not going to do it again.”

Bombast aside, President Trump nevertheless recently signed a similarly massive spending bill that he called “ridiculous.” The bill didn’t fund his promised Southwest border wall and provided money to continue the endless Middle East conflicts. President Trump’s signature does, however, keep the government open until at least December 7.

Congress approved funding for most government agencies for the next fiscal year, but delayed a vote on the more controversial DHS spending bill until December. Current DHS funding will be extended until Dec. 7, meaning the never-ending fights over E-Verify funding, a biometric entry-exit system, border security, and several troubling immigration provisions won’t occur until the always-dangerous lame duck session.

Making the swamp murkier, U.S. Rep. and DHS Appropriations Subcommittee chair Kevin Yoder (R-KS) snuck in last-minute legislation hurtful to both high- and low-skilled American workers. Yoder’s H.R. 392, the Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act, would eliminate the long-standing requirement that no more than 7 percent of any group of employment-based immigrants could come from a single nation.

John Miano, lawyer, tech worker and co-author of Sold Out, called removing country caps an immigration train wreck that would be bad for all Americans. As it currently stands, more than 300,000 Indian nationals and 65,000 Chinese nationals are in line for green cards. The Cato Institute estimates that some legally present visa holders could face 150-year-long green card delays. But eliminating country caps would dramatically accelerate green card issuance to those waiting, good for immigrants and their lawyers, but bad for American workers and population stabilization advocates that want to slow chain migration.

Other goals Yoder is promoting are exemptions for H-2–returning workers from the annual 66,000 cap, potentially quadrupling the number of low-skilled H-2–guest worker visas that can be issued in FY2019. The H-2A is a nonimmigrant visa that allows employers to import low-skilled temporary workers in businesses other than agriculture, such as landscaping and forestry.

In the past, the Department of Labor found program failures, and more recently investigative journalists reported egregious examples of employers failing to comply with the visa’s requirement to hire Americans first, of wage fraud, substandard work conditions and sexual assault incidents. Yoder would also like the H-2A expanded to allow workers to remain in the U.S. year-round instead of seasonally. Continuous presence creates the probability for fathering American citizen children, and constant upward pressure on population growth.

H.R. 392 opponents face an uphill challenge. A huge lobbying effort is underway, and includes powerful and influential names: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the American Immigration Lawyers Association, the American Medical Association and Microsoft. Congressional expansionists are on board too.

Last year, President Trump threatened but didn’t veto the spending bill. This year, assuming President Trump wants to fulfill his campaign promise to defend American workers, he might have the opportunity to, for the first time, exercise his veto power.

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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].

It’s not a great time to be a member of Congress.

According to the latest Gallup poll, the congressional approval rate is currently just 19 percent, with 76 percent disapproving. Congress’ miserable showing surprises no one. After Election Day, campaign promises abruptly vanish, and are replaced by an agenda that voters would never have supported.

Voters have their individual and well-founded gripes. But the re-election campaign of Kansas Republican Congressman Kevin Yoder reflects an unusual degree of flip-flopping just weeks before the November 6.

Yoder is running in Kansas’ competitive 3rd District which Hillary Clinton narrowly carried in 2016. In mid-July Yoder, who chairs the Homeland Security appropriations committee, pledged to provide $5 billion next year for President Trump’s southwest border wall. President Trump, in turn, heartily endorsed Yoder.

Just days later, however, Yoder teamed up with Democrats to support an amendment that would make it easier for asylum claimants to enter and stay in the U.S. The amendment passed on voice vote, and despite stinging criticism from the Trump administration, Yoder remained firm, at least initially. But after Congress re-convened, Yoder walked back his support for looser asylum guidelines.

Yoder, however, told McClatchy News that he will not remove an amendment that he sponsored, H.R. 392, the Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act. The bill, also sponsored by Yoder, would eliminate per-country caps for employment-based green cards and raise per-country caps for family-based green cards.

H.R. 392 would secure the vast majority of green cards for foreign nationals from countries that dominate the H-1–visa program, i.e., India and China. Yoder’s measure would thereby create more permanent competition for American science, technology, engineering and math workers (STEM) and thereby pressure Congress to raise the overall H-1–85, 000 visa cap so that workers from other countries could get green cards.

Yoder assured Indian lobbyists that Congress would pass a green card “fix,” this year – D.C. weasel-speak for make thing worse, in this case adding tens of thousands more H-1–visas. Should Yoder’s bill become law, those visas would displace or deny Americans professional jobs in tech, insurance, banking, hospitals, but would reward cheap labor employers like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google.

In Yoder’s district, many of his constituents have already been displaced through the H-1–visa: in 2017 alone employers hired1,427 visas holders, Department of Labor-certified and approved. Most are designated as Level 1 which the government defines as employees who perform routine tasks that require little if any judgement. Translated, low-skilled foreign nationals, mostly Indian, work in Yoder’s district, and with his blessing. Americans don’t get a shot at those jobs.

During the current 115th Congress, Yoder has consistently voted in favor of more employment-based visas for low and high-skilled workers. In 2017, Yoder co-sponsored the Small and Seasonal Business Relief Act to increase the number of low-skilled guest workers. Then, in 2018, Yoder voted in favor of the Omnibus Spending Bill to increase H-2–visas, and also voted for the Goodlatte-Ryan-Denham amnesty bill, H.R. 6136, that would have increased the number of green cards for overseas workers.

Americans don’t need to understand the H-1–minutiae to catch the drift. U.S. workers are being purposely, rampantly and permanently laid by foreign-born cheap labor. Yoder’s train-wreck H.R. 392 bill would escalate U.S. job displacement to historic and irreversible levels.

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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 number of undocumented immigrants in the United States: Estimates based on demographic modeling with data from 1990 to 2016,” a new study published in the peer-reviewed science journal, PLOS ONE, found that the illegal immigration population in the United States has been, for years, dramatically underestimated.

Using “standard demographic principles of inflow and outflow” and applying the best available and newest data for the period studied, authors Mohammad M. Fazel-Zarandi, Jonathan S. Feinstein and Edward H. Kaplan, arrived at a conservative estimate of 16.7 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. for 2016, and a mean estimate of 22.1 million.

The study, which put the illegal immigrant population at roughly 50 to 100 percent higher than the frequently referenced 11 million estimate, stunned immigration think tanks. The Migration Policy Institute and others questioned how the Census Bureau, the American Community Survey and the National Center for Health Statistics could have overlooked some 11 million illegal immigrants in their population estimates. As MPI put it, “people leave footprints.”

To grassroots immigration skeptics, however, the study’s findings are consistent with their own informal, from-the-front observations. How, immigration critics wonder, could the illegal alien population remain fixed for years at roughly 11 million? The static number certainly seems questionable, given that for decades Republican and Democratic administrations alike have tolerated loose borders, endorsed catch and release, and discouraged interior enforcement.

Whether the illegal immigration population is 11 million, 22 million, somewhere in between or even more, the large number of additional people has a direct effect on U.S. jobs and, rarely discussed, the fragile American environment.

Illegal immigrants, we are often told, come to the U.S. in pursuit of a better life. That generally means adopting an American lifestyle, which is highly consumptive. More people in the U.S. means more consumption and more development. Natural habitat is increasingly lost for more housing, highways, schools, hospitals, stores, restaurants, offices, roads, parking, waste and all the other infrastructure needed by ever-more people. Ultimately, more growth in America means more sprawl and less open space, which means less biodiversity.

Since the first Earth Day in 1970, celebrated during President Nixon’s first term, the U.S. population has increased from 203 million to nearly 329 million in 2018. Looking ahead, the Pew Research Center projects that the U.S. population will reach 441 million by 2065, 88 percent fueled by immigration and births to immigrants.

Two Oregon State University scholars, Paul Murtaugh and Michael Schlax, co-authored a groundbreaking study, “Reproduction and the Carbon Legacies of Individuals,” that added an important perspective to the immigration debate.

According to the research of Murtaugh and Schlax, the average carbon footprint of a Mexico resident is 3.67 tons per year; in the U.S., it’s 20.18 tons. Approximately 5.6 million Mexican illegal immigrants currently reside in the U.S. If humans are indeed the major climate change driver, then logic dictates the solution is fewer people in a country with a high carbon footprint and not more.

The Murtaugh-Schlax study demonstrated that a family choosing to reduce the number of children by one could achieve a lifetime CO2 emissions savings of 9,441 metric tons. Contrast this to that same family electing to increase their car’s fuel economy from 20 to 30 mpg. Improving mpg would result in a savings of only 148 metric tons.

It should be obvious that no amount of recycling, energy efficiency or smart growth will restore America to a sound, sustainable place environmentally.

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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].

Last month, the American Medical Association issued a press release that urged U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to process more H-1–visas, thereby allowing more nonresident physicians to come to the United States to practice medicine. The AMA claimed that a shortage of nonresident physicians who help fill care gaps in medically underserved regions diminishes overall patient care.,

In a letter to USCIS Director Francis Cissna, AMA CEO James L. Madara said that the fixed per country caps which govern H-1–visa issuance keep the agency from processing enough petitions. The AMA, citing data from the Association of American Medical Colleges, concluded that the nation had a physician shortfall of nearly 20,000 in 2016. And since all pleas for more special interest, employment-based visas routinely include doomsday forecasts for future decades, the AMA predicted that by 2030 the shortage will increase to between 42,600 and 121,300.,

But ample evidence exists that the AMA doesn’t need to lobby for foreign-born doctors. Thousands of American medical school graduates are eager for the opportunity to practice their life-saving profession.,

In 2018, nearly 1,100 U.S. medical school seniors and more

than 800 previous U.S. graduates did not match to a residency at a teaching hospital. Without fulfilling a residency, the doctors can’t practice medicine.,

The National Resident Matching Program data reveals that from 2011 to 2018, 8,218 U.S. seniors did not matriculate into residency training. During that same period, 27,866 foreign-trained physicians, non-U.S. international medical graduates (IMGs) on H-1–and J-1 visas were selected for residencies. Although an impressive 94 percent of U.S. citizen medical graduates do match, the six percent that don’t translates to hundreds of individuals who have many years and hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in their extended medical education, but can’t find a job.,

For those that don’t match immediately post-graduation, they can reapply for a residency slot. But the longer they’re out of medical school without a residency, the more difficult their chances of success are.,

Taxpayers subsidize non-U.S. medical school graduates. Federal Medicare funding underwrites residency training positions for about 3,700 non-U.S. IMGs annually. Reducing the number of IMGs who receive residencies would help U.S.-trained physicians get a fair shot at a job. The goal, then, isn’t to eliminate foreign doctors altogether, but rather to put U.S.-educated physicians at the head of the line for coveted residencies.,

Cissna’s office is besieged with requests for more employment-based visas ,’ for ag, leisure and tech. In the IMG’s case, however, they can enter on either an H-1–or J-1 visa. But, on a J-1 they must return home or receive a waiver when their residency ends. The H-1–doesn’t require a waiver to remain, and the visa holder can immediately request lawful permanent status upon his residency’s completion, making it a more attractive option.,

Luckily for deserving U.S. doctors, the AMA’s request will likely fall on deaf ears. While addressing a National Press Club audience last month, Cissna said that his hope is that Congress will soon pass legislation that prohibits visa holders from displacing American workers.,

Until Congress passes such legislation, the AMA should concern itself with qualified, deserving American doctors denied residencies that are given instead to foreign-born physicians.

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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].