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 … Continued
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: … Continued
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 … Continued
Southern District of Texas District Court Judge Hanen finally ruled against the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program after years of legal back-and-forth. The short (by judicial standards) 40-page opinion is a bit anticlimactic, largely because the Federal government put up very little fight. In fact, if you examine the history of DACA closely, … Continued
The CHIPS Act was hailed as bringing the vitally important semiconductor industry to the United States.
The polarization of both the House and Senate has made it largely impossible to pass legislative overhauls without some parliamentary chicanery. Obamacare, Trump’s tax cuts, and Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act were all passed under the budget reconciliation process which allows a simple majority in the Senate to bypass the legislative filibuster. In other words, the … Continued
The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) has a new report examining the free-fall in Department of Labor (DOL) investigations into farmworker abuse, which dropped to a record low of 879. 879 closed cases when hundreds of thousands of H-2A employees are working every year. This continues the trend of “see no evil, hear no evil” of … Continued
Enrique Balcazar, 37, and Elizabeth Balcazar, 21, operators of Balcazar Nature Harvesting, LLC (BNH), were sentenced in Federal court for using the H-2A agricultural visa program to import forced labor. Enrique received 40 months in prison along with fines, and his daughter received time served and fines. BNH was fined approximately $508,000 in restitution to … Continued
In other breaking news, the Earth revolves around the sun. Andrea Flores, an immigration policy advisor under both Presidents Obama and Biden, is going to tell us how to fix the immigration system. Apparently, letting everyone enter the country with employment authorization is the correct answer to driving down the illegal entries. How would rolling … Continued
