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APRIL 17, 2016

WE THE PEOPLE RADIO

WE THE PEOPLE RADIO

Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS)

Our guest: Joe Guzzardi   

Hour 1

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APPEARANCES  APR 17, 2016  APR 30, 2017

JOE GUZZARDI

About Joe

Joe Guzzardi is the National Media Director for Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS), speaking out on the importance of limiting U. S. immigration through sensible federal policies. As an immigration expert with 28 years of experience, Guzzardi has been interviewed on national TV and radio programs in major California markets including NBC/CBS/FOX affiliates.

His syndicated columns on immigration have appeared in hundreds of daily newspapers as well the Huffington Post and others. http://www.capsweb.org/

 
SHOW INFORMATION:
Presidential Campaigns Raising Awareness of Legal Immigration’s Impact on American Workers

By Joe Guzzardi
March 11, 2016

With the Disney IT scandal still percolating, another egregious case of American worker abuse has hit the headlines, this time at health care giant Abbott Laboratories.

A few months ago, Disney fired 500 of its IT employees, and then forced them to train their foreign-born replacements or lose their severance. One former Disney worker with twenty years of experience and who had earned glowing corporate evaluations, Leo Perrero, described the experience of training his less qualified replacements as humiliating.

Much to Illinois Senator Richard Durbin’s displeasure, the identical script—fire Americans and replace them H-1B visa holders—is playing out at Abbott, headquartered in suburban Chicago. Durbin sent off a blistering letter to Abbott’s Chief Executive Officer Miles White urging him to cancel the estimated 180 layoffs. During a recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Durbin learned that the targeted employees had been told that they would be terminated on April 22 after training their replacements who will come mostly from India. Rubbing salt into the wounds, the new overseas employees will be sent back to India after being trained, and will therefore not be able to contribute tax revenues to the local economy.

In his letter, Durbin called out White for “harsh and insensitive conduct” that cannot be justified “by whatever marginal financial benefit might accrue to your company which is already making billions of dollars in profits every year.” Abbott reported 2015 net earnings of $2.59 billion on $20.4 billion in sales. The crass corporate behavior offends even pro-immigration Durbin, a leading Democrat on the failed Gang of Eight amnesty legislation.

Perrero ended his testimony with a question that many Americans are asking: How can our law makers allow this to happen? By “this,” Perrero means putting qualified Americans on unemployment insurance, creating great family anxiety, and eventually even take low-paying jobs that may end plans to send their children to college.

The H-1B visa has an ugly 25 year history. H-1B visas were introduced in 1990, and the annual cap has reached as high as 195,000. Today, the maximum level is 85,000 including 20,000 who have earned American university master’s degrees. President Obama and the Silicon Valley lobby have exerted intense pressure on Congress to lift or even eliminate the cap.

Under the law, visa users must have specialized training or a bachelor's degree in the subject for which they are being hired; they must be offered the prevailing wage for that work, and they can take only jobs for which the employers could not find a qualified American worker. But employers have consistently broken the law, and gotten away with their violations. Countless studies from bipartisan think tanks have exposed the fraud and abuse. The Center for Investigative Reporting, the New England Public Policy Center for the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, and the Economic Policy Institute have spotlighted the flagrant deception and abuse common in the H1-B program. A 2011 General Accounting Office report concluded that the departments of Labor and Homeland Security have ignored their oversight and enforcement responsibilities as they apply to visa workers' qualifications and wages.

To date, despite numerous congressional hearings, the visa’s flaws and its inherent dangers to American workers remain. But several presidential candidates have made visas and their deleterious effect on Americans an essential part of their campaigns, and created an uptick in the general public’s awareness, a long overdue step in the right direction.

U.S. v. Texas: a Primer

By Joe Guzzardi
April 6, 2014
 
Senate Republicans filed an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court against President Obama’s deferred action for parents of American citizens and lawful permanent residents, the so-called DAPA program. Of the 54-member GOP conference, 43 signed the brief including Majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and whip John Cornyn (R-TX). McConnell and his colleagues called Obama’s immigration action a “brazen challenge” to Congress’ lawmaking powers.
 
Last month, the House filed a similar brief which read, in part, that "neither any immigration law now on the books nor the Constitution empowers [Obama] to authorize – let alone facilitate – the prospective violation of those laws on a massive class-wide scale.”
 
The amicus briefs are the latest development in the simmering immigration debate that will come to a head on April 18 when the Supreme Court hears U.S. v. Texas, the year’s most important case. When the court hands down its decision before the June recess, historians will forever refer to it as a legal landmark.
 
The immigration conflict that pits Obama against Congress dates back at least to 2010. In October of that year, Obama said on more than 20 separate occasions that he’s neither a king nor an emperor and that, therefore, he “just can’t make up laws by myself."
 
Yet despite Obama’s comforting words – comforting at least to Americans who feared that he would overreach his executive powers to enact an amnesty – the President soon contradicted himself and ordered Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson to draft the DAPA memo which would grant temporary legal status to about five million illegal immigrants, and would protect them from deportation. In so doing, Obama violated the Take Care clause which orders the president to faithfully execute the nation’s laws, a key element which the court will also consider.
 
Basically, the President couldn’t sell his program to Congress, so he acted independently and bypassed the legislative branch. In the eyes of the GOP and other legal scholars, Obama proceeded unconstitutionally. Obama and Johnson cannot simply will new federal programs into existence on a whim, with a wholesale suspension of immigration law. Existing immigration laws provide for asylum, adjustment of status, various visas, removal and cancellation of removal. But nowhere do they provide a path for affirmative benefits for illegal immigrants.
 
Deportation is not at the heart of the Supreme Court case. Two lower courts ruled earlier that the President can continue to exercise discretion on which aliens the administration chooses to deport or allows to remain. At issue and for the court to decide is whether the President can confer employment authorization documents, Social Security numbers, disability payments, Medicare and earned income tax credits. Beyond the federal benefits, DAPA would inflict costs on state taxpayers, too, in the form of driver’s licenses and unemployment insurance.
 
And there’s still more that the Supreme Court can fault the administration for. The congressional Administrative Procedures Act (APA) requires federal agencies to use notice-and-comment rulemaking when they promulgate new substantive rules. During the comment period, Americans can express their opinions about the proposed laws. This mandatory procedure was unheeded this time, an indisputable fact.
 
Based on incontrovertible facts, the court must rule for Texas. With only eight justices, however, four seemingly predisposed to Obama’s views and four opposed, the likely outcome is a 4-4 tie which would affirm the appeals court’s earlier decision against DAPA.

 
New York Joins Calif., Others in Giving Teaching Credentials to DREAMers

By Joe Guzzardi

CAPS Senior Writing Fellow. Guzzardi's Op-eds about California social issues have appeared in newspapers throughout California and elsewhere for 27 years.

March 25, 2016
New York State will soon approve legislation that will allow illegal immigrants who have temporary legal status, DREAMers, to teach in public schools. The Board of Regents voted to allow deferred action for childhood arrivals to apply for state certification and teaching licenses, assuming they have met the other requirements and passed the necessary tests.

State Education Commissioner MaryEllen Elia, fired from her previous job as Florida’s Hillsborough County Superintendent of Schools, was effusive about granting teaching licenses to DREAMers. Elia argued, “We shouldn’t close the door on their dreams. Allowing these young people to get professional licenses will open up a new world of economic opportunity for them.” She added that “they’ve done everything right.”

As is always the case on contentious immigration bills, the State Assembly was divided along party lines about the decision. Democrats heartily endorsed the idea, while Republicans countered that the legislature should have voted on a measure that has the magnitude of issuing education credentials to noncitizens.

Two areas of primary concern: first, giving teaching job opportunities to DACA recipients obviously makes the field more competitive for American-born applicants. Since DREAMers likely speak Spanish, and New York’s growing Hispanic population is filling up schools and adding pressure to add bilingual instructors, DREAMers have the inside track to employment.

Long Island Republican Dean Murray issued a critical statement which said that licensing illegal immigrants is “an insult” to legal residents hoping to teach, and “a slap in the face to law-abiding taxpayers.”

Second, New York’s decision could and probably will encourage other states and cities to follow. California, Nevada and Denver have passed legislation similar to New York’s.

A better long-term solution to educating the nation’s 50 million K-12 students would be to have sensible immigration levels that reduces the number of non-English speakers and puts less pressure on school districts to hire Spanish-language speakers. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, students speaking a language other than English at home rose from 4.7 million in 1980 to 11.2 million in 2009. In California, 44 percent of persons over age five do not communicate in English at home.

 
Seven Amnesties Since 1980 Contribute to 35 Years of Income Inequality in America

By Joe Guzzardi

CAPS Senior Writing Fellow. Guzzardi's Op-eds about California social issues have appeared in newspapers throughout California and elsewhere for 27 years.

March 17, 2016
For the tiny handful of Americans who may still wonder why the voter rebellion against the establishment is so intense, a recent Economic Policy Institute blog post explains it. EPI called income inequality “a defining feature” of the American economy for the last three-and-a-half decades that has “directly affected most Americans.”

In the example that EPI cites, had workers’ wages increased correspondingly with productivity, as they did for 30 years post-World War II, an employed American earning $50,000 today would instead be making $75,000.

The economic data EPI points to, which has enraged working Americans, includes the following:

  • Nominal wage growth of 2.2 percent remains below a level where workers would reap the benefits of economic growth.
  • Real hourly wage growth in 2015 was fastest at the top of the wage distribution.
  • The gap between the top and everyone else has grown.
  • Evaluating men and women separately, from 2014 to 2015, the strongest wage growth was at the top of the men’s wage distribution and at the bottom of the women’s wage distribution.
  • For men and women, those with less than a college degree had lower wages in 2015 than in 2007.
For broke Americans, little relief is in sight.

Democrats and Republicans alike promise to end income inequality, but voters have no confidence in their assurances. Little wonder they’re apprehensive. Income inequality dates back to the Reagan administration, and includes the George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama presidencies – two Democrats and three Republicans.

Since 1980, all five presidents have supported high immigration, outsourcing, trade deals and the increased distribution of employment-based visas to foreign-born nationals. During the period, Congress passed seven amnesties that provided employment authorization documents to at least 5.5 million illegal immigrants.

The upcoming Supreme Court U.S. v. Texas decision could reward nearly 5 million more aliens with work permits, further depressing Americans’ wages and ensuring that income inequality would continue.

Please go to the CAPS Action Alert page here to tell your representative to sign the House amicus brief that opposes President Obama’s lawless power grab amnesty that would grant millions more work permits to aliens.

For broke Americans, little relief is in sight.

 
On Jackie Robinson Day, April 15, 2016, Fewer Blacks, More Overseas Players

By Joe Guzzardi

CAPS Senior Writing Fellow. Guzzardi's Op-eds about California social issues have appeared in newspapers throughout California and elsewhere for 27 years.

April 14, 2016
Tomorrrow, Jackie Robinson Day, Major League Baseball will celebrate the anniversary of the first African-American player to break the color line in 1947. As MLB Commissioners and team owners have done in past years, they publicly bemoan the diminishing number of black Americans in baseball, and vow to work overtime to restore them to their once prominent position. Today’s rosters have only a few black players who in total represent about 8 percent of all players.
MLB systematically displaces black American players.

The truth, however, is the owners, with the blessing of the commissioner’s office, have systematically displaced American players with Dominicans who they can sign more cheaply, and bring to the U.S. on a P visa which has no numerical cap. The P visa was created during the George W. Bush administration. Bush, a former Texas Rangers partner, was sympathetic to appeals from his owner buddies for the freer flow of international players, and he promoted the P with Congress.

Now American players face another threat, Cubans. While Cubans have long had a presence in major league baseball, President Obama’s commitment to normalize, as he calls it, relations with the Communist country will mean more players from the island.

Few fans think of playing baseball as a job, but that’s exactly what it is. Players sign contracts, have reporting times, answer to their managers, and have specific responsibilities to carry out. And baseball is not just a job; it’s the best job in the world. The minimum annual salary exceeds $500,000; the average is above $4 million; experienced bench players can earn $10 million, and the game’s best player hauls in $34 million. That’s not all. Even though the team feeds them before and after games, players get $100 day in meal money. They travel on charter flights, have outstanding medical benefits, and are members in America’s most powerful union.

Defaulting such great jobs to overseas players from not only the Dominican Republic and Cuba, but also Korea, Japan and Taiwan, is inexcusable. But it certainly has lined the owners’ pockets. Baseball is a $9 billion industry. About 27.5 percent of all players are foreign-born.

Owners insist that these players are the cream of the world’s baseball crop, a claim similar to Silicon Valley’s that the H-1Bs they sponsor are the best. In truth, the imported baseball players are outstanding talents, but no one really knows if they’re better than Americans. The average fan can’t tell the difference between the Fresno State starting shortstop and the Caribbean player.

If baseball owners were sincerely interested in helping black Americans get back into baseball, then they’d have player camps in the U.S. to develop their skill sets. Instead, those camps are found exclusively in the Dominican Republic where, of the 30 MLB baseball franchises, 29 have a presence.

 
 

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