Newsletter: Before you vote, check their grades

Border Czar Tom Homan promised worksite enforcement; Democrats debated border policy; and a bill to abolish DHS got five cosponsors. All of these plus much more happened during a supposedly “slow” week in Washington.

There’s also an election next week. NumbersUSA is a bipartisan, single-issue organization that does not endorse candidates. But we’ve updated the immigration grades for your members of Congress.

Share Their Grades

At the link above, you’ll also find new messages to send via social media and email, including:

• Worksite Enforcement: Tom Homan says a plan is on Sec. Mullin’s desk. Enforcement shouldn’t depend on who runs DHS. Pass E-Verify.
• Visa Lottery: A court ordered the State Department to resume a lottery that randomly issues green cards. The administration is appealing. Congress should be repealing.
• H-1B: Microsoft continues to demonstrate its preference for H-1B workers. This is no labor shortage; fix it or end it.
• Water: Mass immigration is a water-intensive enterprise and it’s time to tighten the faucet.

Take Action

Democrats Debate Border Policy

The ACLU and Searchlight Institute are in open debate about what the Democratic Party’s border policies should look like. Searchlight accuses the ACLU of making the “same failed arguments” that were “directly responsible for the border crisis.”

Searchlight’s own report was written by former Biden DHS official Blas Nuñez-Neto, who was involved in the failed 2024 Senate border deal that would have required a minimum level of illegal immigration. His plan calls for amnesties and legal immigration increases to fill jobs in industries that say they need foreign workers. That prescription would do little to advance economic fairness for American workers. But his diagnosis of what’s gone wrong at the border is largely correct:

• Enforcement works
• U.S. immigration policy is the biggest driver of migration
• Claiming asylum to work here “is basically the definition of gaming the asylum system”
• “We will never be able to provide sufficient legal pathways to satisfy global demand for migration”

Those are important starting points for any party serious about developing a workable border policy. So is his recognition that lasting reforms must come from Congress.

Where Is the Debate Headed?

According to the New York Times, the top immigration priority for Democratic congressional leaders is “to take some action to make ICE more accountable.” Democratic Socialist candidates, meanwhile, are vying to abolish the agency altogether.

“Democrats are sure they oppose the actions of ICE,” writes longtime Democratic analyst Ruy Teixeira. “Are they willing to deport any illegal immigrants besides violent criminals? Or do illegal immigrants who are not violent criminals simply get to stay here forever (which is really a soft version of open borders)?”

Bad Ideas

This month, Rep. Delia Ramirez introduced the Reimagining Safety Act (H.R. 10803) with five cosponsors. Her bill would:

• Abolish the Department of Homeland Security.
• Release every migrant in detention and remove every ankle monitor.
• Repeal the authority to detain individuals in expedited removal proceedings.
• Require an act of Congress to remove any individual from the United States.
• Permanently ban wall funding.
• Provide grants, housing assistance, lawyers, and public-benefits enrollment assistance to households of detained or deported individuals.

Bonkers. See our bill tracker.

Good Ideas

Rep. Michael Rulli cosponsored four Great Solutions this week, bringing his grade up to an A:

• End mass immigration / Limit family-based to spouses and children (H.R. 2705)*
• End the OPT program that offers employers discounts for not hiring Americans (H.R. 2315)
• Require employers to E-Verify the work authorization of new hires (H.R. 251)
• Permanently secure the border / Close asylum loopholes (H.R. 116)

*58 Members of Congress have an A in this category (Chain Migration) vs. 80 who have an F-minus. Everyone else is sitting the debate out.

See who’s who

In Other News

U Visa Scam: A fake robbery staged to help people fraudulently acquire a “victim’s visa” ended in bloodshed.

Birth Tourism: DHS Secretary Mullin is ending a program that allowed Chinese nationals to travel to the Northern Mariana Islands (a U.S. territory) for up to 14 days without a visa.

Sanctuary: District attorneys in New York have been downgrading charges against illegal aliens to help them avoid deportation, according to a House report.

Who’s Afraid of the Working Class? A bipartisan group of 34 senators is urging the Trump administration to once again release the maximum number of supplemental H-2B visas.

H-1B: Microsoft committed to “global talent movement” during a leaked company meeting this week. The tech giant recently announced it was offering buyouts to 60,000 employees.

H-1B In Texas: The Texas Department of Agriculture announced its intention to deny grants to businesses that employ H-1B workers (although there are significant exemptions).

Stay Tuned

Any day now, we expect the Department of Labor to issue a new rule governing employers who hire foreign workers. Employers who use the so-called “PERM process” must certify that they have tried to recruit Americans and that bringing in a foreign worker will not affect the wages of U.S. workers. Will the DOL’s rule be strong enough? Stay tuned for our reaction!

Companies have long used fake job advertisements to “prove” they couldn’t find Americans. And the captive-labor arrangements common in the H-1B program give employers another reason to prefer foreign workers.

ICYMI

Worksite Enforcement Works: When it has been tried, legal workers filled the jobs, Americans got better pay, and employers had the peace of mind of knowing their employees were authorized.

Deportation Stats Are Not All Equal: DHS has not published its monthly deportations tables since the Biden administration.

NumbersUSA In The News

Sean Moran of the Daily Caller News Foundation interviewed me for his investigation into how the H-1B program treats American STEM graduates. Even before the AI boom, fewer than half of the 400,000-plus Americans earning STEM degrees each year ended up in STEM careers.

“Why put your family into debt to get a degree in one of these occupations when you know that the government is offering a financial incentive to employers to either not hire you in the first place or to push you out the door once you start making real money at that organization or in that occupation?”

If the program can’t be fixed, Congress will have to eliminate it. Sean also included a video of Roy explaining a period in our history when tight labor markets gave working-class Americans real leverage.

This Week In Immigration History

October 26, 2006: Secure Fence Act signed. President Bush signed the bipartisan law mandating roughly 700 miles of double-layered fencing on the southern border. Language in a 2008 appropriations bill gave DHS discretion over the type and placement of barriers. That made it a case study in Congress passing enforcement and then quietly hollowing it out.

Oct. 28, 1886: Statue of Liberty dedicated. The statue was conceived to celebrate the Union victory and the emancipation of American slaves. Sculptor Frédéric Bartholdi’s early design had Liberty holding a broken chain and shackle. By dedication day, the chain had been replaced with a tablet bearing the date of the Declaration of Independence. A broken shackle remains at her feet, visible mainly from the air.

Emma Lazarus’s poem wasn’t part of the dedication. It went on a plaque inside the pedestal in 1903.

The ships sailing past Lady Liberty’s torch carried more than 22 million immigrants between 1880 and 1914. As NumbersUSA founder Roy Beck documents in Back of the Hiring Line, that wave filled the Northern jobs that could have offered freed slaves a way out of the Jim Crow South. The Great Migration of Southern Blacks began only when immigration slowed during the Great War, and accelerated after the 1924 restrictions.

Quotes Of The Week

“By the time FDR came to power, which was eight years after the [1924] immigration restrictions, the working class was already doing so much better than their predecessors were. They felt they deserved the dignity and representation that they had earned. That should be happening now.” – Christopher Caldwell, on the Weekly Dish with Andrew Sullivan

“The practice of bypassing and replacing American workers is not unique to Microsoft. It is standard among the largest H‑1B employers, including Amazon, Apple, Google, and Meta.” – Ron Hira, Commonplace