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Using what has been described as “strong-arm tactics,” Japan’s ruling Liberal Democrat Party pushed legislation through the Diet (Japanese parliament) early last month to expand the nation’s guest worker program. 55 percent opposed the law but that apparently did not bother the ruling Party. It rammed the bill through the Diet rather build broad public consensus on the need for change. That’s not unlike how the ruling elites in the United States have pushed through guest worker programs that are detrimental to American workers.

When the Exchange Visitor Program was created in 1961, it was designed to "increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries by means of educational and cultural exchange." Participants are allowed to work so, for many years, the program enabled young adults to serve as au pairs, camp counselors and teachers in the U.S. But businesses are now using the program to secure seasonal workers, much like under the H-2B visa program, in ways not anticipated under the original program.

This week, snow hit the Washington, D.C. area and commuters received a treat. I’m not talking about the beautiful white landscape, although that certainly was there. I mean that commuters, when the federal government shut down, got to experience what driving would be like if area population was dramatically smaller. That's a rare treat, indeed, in an area where population is booming, driven by immigration.

In a speech Monday Donald Trump outlined his proposal for increasing immigrant vetting, which the mainstream media immediately slammed as being “un-American” and “crazy.” But as several notable scholars point out, history and the law are on Mr. Trump’s side, not theirs. For example, as Professor George Borjas of Harvard’s Kennedy School recently quipped “If [they] just do a couple of minutes of googling before reacting, it would become very apparent very quickly that immigrant vetting has a very long tradition in American history.”