Border Policy, Housing, Water, and Farms
News
A Better Border Policy (can it get much worse?)
Immigration policy, like a river, requires stewardship
Water and immigration levels are important measures of the health and sustainability of our nation. Both must be managed with care.
House approves FY2024 DHS Spending Bill
The House of Representatives approved a spending bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security for the 2024 fiscal year. The Republican-led effort included a number of provisions to strengthen immigration enforcement, including defunding the Biden Administration's use of the CBP One app to allow illegal migrants to apply for parole and defunding other efforts by the administration to weaken interior enforcement and expand its parole authority. In a piece of good news, a harmful provision that would have drastically expanded H-2 visas was reverted back to last year's provision that only allows the DHS Secretary, in consultation with the Department of Labor, roughly double the number of H-2B visas for the fiscal year.
New Regulations Demonstrate H2 Visas Need Real Reform
Both the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and the Wage and Hour Division (WHD) have noticed new regulations designed to protect foreign workers from the explosion of exploitation within the labor market. While the attempts to stop the exploitation should be applauded, the new regulations are properly understood as mere Band-Aids on deep wounds.
Latest numbers add urgency to the effort to attach border reforms to government funding
The 304,000 encounters is the equivalent of a Newark, NJ or Saint Paul, MN attempting to enter illegally every month - and that does not count so-called "gottaways" who evade detection. As Congress determines how to fund the government's implementation of immigration policy, the need to reform border strategy has become more apparent and urgent.
Government Says Asylum Fraud is "Endemic" and Reason System is "Broken"
Immigration Attorney Julia Greenberg was convicted of defrauding the asylum system late last year and is approaching her sentencing date soon. Along with an organization called “Russian America,” Greenberg coached clients to lie under oath and fabricated false stories for their asylum applications. The asylum fraud is not just happening at the border, but it is going on nationwide.
Fareed Zakaria Proves Late is Better Than Never
Fareed Zakaria, one of the scions of DC punditry, has finally faced the facts that current Biden policies on immigration are completely wrong. More remarkably, he has taken that indubitable reality to its logical conclusion–Zakaria calls for closing the border to asylum applicants while the system attempts to absorb the millions already in the pipeline.
DHS Extends Temporary Protected Status to Cover Nearly 500k Aliens
Milton Friedman once wrote “Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.” While evidence of this truism abounds, one of the greatest examples is Temporary Protected Status (TPS). The Biden Administration just announced a massive expansion of TPS for Venezuela that the government estimates extends protection from removal and employment authorization documents (EADs) to 472,000 additional aliens present in the country.
Border Crisis Threatens Cities' Resilience
Much has been made of how surge in illegal immigration into cities as far from the border as Chicago and New York threaten the fiscal resilience of the receiving cities (Mayor Adams says the migrant crisis will "destroy New York City"), and the impact on resilience doesn't end there.
