Hopeless in America Posted By Michael Cutler Immigration Lawlessness and the Destruction of the American Dream.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/michael-cutler/hopeless-in-america/print/
When he came to office, not unlike other politicians, Obama made many promises. Nearly every promise he made has remained unfulfilled — with one exception: The promise that “change has come to America.”
My dad used to tell me that nothing was so good it could not be better or be so bad it could not get worse. Things have indeed gotten worse, much worse, and it would appear that there is no bottom as to how far we may ultimately fall at the hands of an administration and politicians from both sides of the aisle, who only care about garnering huge campaign contributions and winning elections at any and all costs. America and Americans are, indeed, picking up that tab.
America is at it lowest ebb in many decades, perhaps since its founding.
Let’s start out by considering a CBS News 60 Minutes report, “High joblessness in the home of U.S. space flight” [2]that aired on April 1, 2012. Here is the intro to that report:
With the end of the space shuttle program, Brevard County, Fla., lost its largest employer, and Kennedy Space Center workers lost good jobs that made them proud. Scott Pelley reports.
I urge you to take the time to watch that video. Thousands of engineers and high-tech workers were laid off and cannot find jobs. So much for the bald-faced lie that we lack engineers.
The “American Dream” that any American, willing to get a good education, work hard and benefit from a bit of luck could succeed and elevate himself/herself from poverty to a solid economic standing and write the next American success story has been all but killed off. For the first time in many decades, it is expected that the newest generation will likely not do as well as their parents.
Wages continue to drop while expenses continue to rise. The United States Department of Labor has become little more than a mechanism in the administration’s Orwellian propaganda machine, spewing meaningless statistics that include the current unemployment rate of 5.5% which blithely ignores the tens of millions of working-age Americans who have stopped looking for work, are underemployed or have run out of unemployment benefits.
Under this administration our immigration laws have become meaningless, with millions of illegal aliens being granted official identity documents even though their mere presence in the United States represents a violation of our nation’s immigration laws, which are among the most fundamental laws of any nation. Those laws were enacted to prevent the entry and continuing presence of aliens whose presence poses a threat to the safety and well-being of our nation and our citizens and have absolutely nothing to do with race, religion or ethnicity.
By making an utter mockery of those laws our nation has suffered in many ways. Our leaders set the tone of our citizens. Many years ago when Jimmy Carter was the President of the United States, I served a subpoena on a utility company in New York City for business records relating to an investigation I was conducting. The company was more than willing to provide the information that we needed for the investigation but required a subpoena because of the privacy rights of its customers.
I sat in a waiting area as the corporate records and noticed a huge glass bowl on a credenza. The bowl was filled to the brim with peanuts. Carter had been a peanut farmer and I supposed that the peanuts related to Mr. Carter’s background.
Several years later I found myself once again sitting in that waiting area as business records I had subpoenaed were being assembled. Carter had lost his bid for re-election and Ronald Reagan had become the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The huge glass bowl still sat on that credenza but the peanuts had been replaced by jelly beans — Mr. Reagan’s snack of choice.
The point is that we tend to play the game of “Follow the Leader” in many ways. This is one of many reasons why our leaders must be mindful of the pervasive impact that their actions and statements have on our nation and our citizens.
When the president makes a mockery of the need to secure our borders against the entry of those who would evade the inspections process and provide lawful status and employment authorization to hundreds of thousands of aliens who entered the United States without inspection the message is that it is acceptable — indeed, commendable — to violate our laws.
Our immigration laws are, in fact, generally the first set of laws that most aliens encounter. This provides the first impression about our nation, our leaders and our resolve to enforce our laws.
Meanwhile the leadership of both the Democratic and Republican parties insist on the need to enact “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” to provide unknown millions of illegal aliens with lawful status and the authority to work in the United States — providing them with an equal standing in the already overflowing labor pool.
This further erodes any belief in the rule of law and further exacerbates the struggles of unemployed and underemployed American workers and their families.
I addressed this issue in my Winter, 2015 article for “The Social Contract” that was entitled, “Human Capital – America’s most fundamental and significant resource.” [3]
Mr. Obama and others have made numerous statements about how poverty, especially in the American minority communities, lead to frustration which added to the anger demonstrated by the rioters in Baltimore this past week.
It has been said that it is illogical to bring “sand to the beach.” In an economy where unemployment and underemployment is a huge issue- notwithstanding the bogus unemployment statistics issued by the Labor Department each month, you would think that the goal of the government would be to make certain that American workers would be given every opportunity to find decent jobs, not flood the labor market with ever increasing numbers of foreign workers.
The mega-wealthy CEOs that are determined to trim labor costs are succeeding. Wages are in decline for middle class workers and today there are record numbers of American families living below the poverty line.
Furthermore, even without legalizing millions of illegal aliens, the United States admits many more foreign workers who are authorized to work in the United States each year than the number of new jobs that are created annually. Americans are running up an accelerating “down economic escalator.”
The argument that our schools fail to produce the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) professionals is a false argument.
On April 20, 2015 ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) issued a press release, “ICE tracks non-immigrant students in the US” [4] that stated that “according to a recent Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) report [5], there were more than 1.1 million nonimmigrant students studying in the United States as of February 2015; the majority of whom were from China, India and South Korea.”
The press release noted that ICE was “tracking” those students with the assistance of faculty members of all of the schools that these foreign students are attending. In point of fact, there are more than 9,000 schools that are authorized to petition the State Department to issue student visas for foreign students and rarely, if ever, seeks to locate students that fail to attend schools for which they were admitted to attend, or otherwise violate the terms of their admission.
On September 3, 2014 I was interviewed by J.D. Hayworth on his Newsmax-TV program. A video of my interview along with a synopsis of the segment was published on the Newsmax website under the title, “Ex-INS Officer: Hire More Agents to Find Missing Visa Holders.” [6] The predication for my interview was an ABC News report, “Lost in America: Visa Program Struggles to Track Missing Foreign Students.” [7] that had focused on how 6,000 foreign students of particular concern to DHS had gone “missing.”
Here is how this truly disturbing report begins:
The Department of Homeland Security [8] has lost track of more than 6,000 foreign nationals who entered the United States on student visas, overstayed their welcome, and essentially vanished — exploiting a security gap that was supposed to be fixed after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks.
“My greatest concern is that they could be doing anything,” said Peter Edge, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement official who oversees investigations into visa violators. “Some of them could be here to do us harm.”
Homeland Security officials disclosed the breadth of the student visa problem in response to ABC News questions submitted as part of an investigation into persistent complaints about the nation’s entry program for students.
ABC News found that immigration officials have struggled to keep track of the rapidly increasing numbers of foreign students coming to the U.S. — now in excess of one million each year. The immigration agency’s own figures show that 58,000 students overstayed their visas in the past year. Of those, 6,000 were referred to agents for follow-up because they were determined to be of heightened concern.
“They just disappear,” said Sen. Tom Coburn [9], R-Okla. “They get the visas and they disappear.”
Coburn said since the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, 26 student visa holders have been arrested in the U.S. on terror-related charges.
Here are a few “take-aways”
By not looking for the majority of students who go missing, we send a clear message, violations of visas are not aggressively pursued. Any aspiring illegal aliens just needs to enter the United States and ignore the terms of their admission.
Second- consider how much damage just 19 terrorists inflicted on the United States on September 11, 2001. Now the DHS is concerned about 6,000
This is hardly a new problem.
I have testified before well over a dozen Congressional hearings in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Perhaps the highest profile hearing I for which I have been called to testify was conducted on March 19, 2002 by the House Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Immigration and Claims, on the topic: “INS’s March 200 Notification of Approval of Change of Status for Pilots Training for Terrorist Hijackers Mohammed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi. [10]”
This hearing is the hearing I referenced during my interview today.
This hearing was covered by C-SPAN and the C-SPAN video [11] is one that every member of Congress should be required to watch.
Our universities are training our competitors and the argument that we should provide foreign students with green cards ignores the fact that these foreign students are replacing Americans. If we are to end the cycle of poverty in America, we must make the success of Americans the goal of our universities.
Additionally, by providing foreign nationals with high-tech education, we may well be training the future leaders of those countries who are are economic and potentially military adversaries.
On April 27, 2015 60 minutes aired a report about how China has developed anti-satellite technology that threatens our satellites upon which our nation depends for communications, for our GPS systems and for our military to address national security issues. The video, “60 Minutes:” Satellite security targeted in space [12] paints a clear picture of how serious this threat is.
The question not asked during the program is how many of the engineers working for China’s military and in fact, the military of other countries, may have been trained in the Unitd States. The previously noted video is a condensed version of the lengthier report that aired on 60 Minutes. Here are the links to the original report in two segments: “The Battle Above, part one” [13]and “The Battle Above, part two.” [14]
On October 13, 2014 I presented my policy brief, “The Liberal Case for Effective Immigration Law Enforcement” [15] at the PFIR (Progressives For Immigration Reform) Conference on Immigration, Conservation & Environment. A video of my presentation [16] at this conference has also been posted on You Tube.
The Department of Labor releases employment statistics each month. According to the statistics for the first three months of 2015, fewer than 200,000 jobs were created for each of those months.
The DHS issued report, “Nonimmigrant Admissions to the United States: 2013″ [17] contains important statistics about just how many authorized foreign workers are admitted into the United States annually.
Table 1 (found on pages 3 and 4 of the document) indicates that in 2013 a total of 2,996,743 temporary (non-immigrant) foreign workers and their families were admitted into the United States. The chart also indicates that a total of 1,853,915 temporary workers and trainees were admitted.
These statistics do not include the approximately one million lawful immigrants admitted into the U. S. each year who are immediately granted employment authorization. This report also does not report on the hundreds of thousands of other aliens who are granted employment authorization under the DACA (Deferred Action- Childhood Arrivals) Program and other similar programs, such as political asylum.
The claims made by politicians and corporate executives and the commentators on news programs, that somehow bringing in even more workers will revitalize the economy is baseless and contradicts reason and commonsense. Furthermore, wage suppression also drags the economy down. As consumers lose disposable income they will be less able to purchase consumer products.
Recent economic statistics show that the economy is not improving. Furthermore, not unexpectedly, foreign workers seek to send as much of their earnings back to their families in their home countries as they possibly can. The money that is wired home (remittances) amounts to more than 125 billion dollars annually. This is money that is not earned by Americans. This is money that is not spent or invested in the United States. When the multiplier factor is taken into account, this loss of money accounts for most of the annual increase America’ national debt. Add to this the suppression of wages for American workers and the increasing number of Americans who go from being tax paying middle class consumers to people living below the poverty line and becoming dependent on so-called economic safety-net programs. This further increases our national debt.
In the short term corporations may save money by reducing labor costs. However, in the long term, hiring increasing numbers of foreign workers will create and unsustainable situation and undermine America’s economy. The middle class provides the consumer base for most American businesses.
The economic food chain is being disrupted and while it may take awhile for the critters at the top of the food chain to feel the consequences of the harm being done to those at the bottom of the food chain, the cascading problems will impact all of us in the long term.
My parents used to tell me that “talk is cheap” and that “actions speak louder than words.”
It is time that our leaders sent a clear message, through their own actions, that no one is above the law and that our laws must be obeyed or there will be serious consequences. It is time that our government effectively enforced our immigration laws and put the focus on getting Americans back to work. For all of the promises about helping to created jobs that is spewed by politicians from both parties, the best way to proceed is to liberate jobs by effective enforcement of our immigration laws.
This is the only way to break the cycle of poverty that is creating chaos throughout the United States and preventing Americans from living up to their full potential.
On April 13, 2015 Progressives For Immigration Reform published my article, “It Is Time For Us To ‘Get Smart’ And Combat (Immigration) KAOS.” [18]
The title of a recent commentary I wrote for Californians for Population Stabilization should serve as the heart-felt motto for our leaders, “For America to Do Well, Americans Must Do Well.” [19]
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