There's work to be done

but DEMs prefer to play childish games

Things to be done: pass bills

Waiting by John Burroughs


Serene, I fold my hands and wait,
Nor care for wind, nor tide, nor sea;
I rave no more 'gainst time or fate,
For lo! my own shall come to me.


Things to be done: School Vouchers

Why do people say Education is dangerous in USA nowadays?

I stay my haste, I make delays,
For what avails this eager pace?
I stand amid the eternal ways,
And what is mine shall know my face.

Asleep, awake, by night or day,
The friends I seek are seeking me;
No wind can drive my bark astray,
Nor change the tide of destiny.


Things to be done: infrastructure


What matter if I stand alone?
I wait with joy the coming years;
My heart shall reap where it hath sown,
And garner up its fruit of tears.

The waters know their own and draw
The brook that springs in yonder height;
So flows the good with equal law
Unto the soul of pure delight.


Things to be done: Canada, Mexico, USA deal (to replace NAFTA)  **Finally passed in January, 2020   What about Iran?     What about China?      Russia?  These are all good, no excellent reasons why a DEM Pres. would be a horrible idea - ever again.

The stars come nightly to the sky;
The tidal wave unto the sea;
Nor time, nor space, nor deep, nor high,
Can keep my own away from me.


Things to be done: - Healthcare reform - what's the Pres. Trump Vision?

The Entire USA Wants Immigration Reform

RE:  Immigrants (not those already here illegally)

The evidence that illegal immigration and mass immigration are harming our country is overwhelming and irrefutable. Congestion, environment, crime, health care, education — the costs are too high for the American family to continue to bear.

Since immigration burst on the scene as a major national issue some 20 years ago, the term “reform” has been associated with those who believe that large-scale illegal immigration is a serious problem and overall levels of immigration need to be reduced. We’ve been educating the public for the last 25 years on the need for true and comprehensive reform, so when it comes to defining “reform”, we’ve written the book on it. Opponents of these reforms claimed that a problem did not exist and therefore reform was unnecessary.

Recently the political winds have shifted. As opponents of reform learned that the majority of the public were “pro-reform”, they changed their tune and have tried to wrap their defense of unchecked illegal immigration and record levels of legal immigration as being “reform measures” when, in fact, they are measures that will “deform” our already broken system.

True comprehensive immigration reform must adhere to this set of immutable principles:

First Principle: Cut the Numbers
Any level of illegal immigration is unacceptable, and current legal immigrant admissions of about one million persons each year are entirely too many.
Any measure that increases either illegal or legal immigration violates this principle. Immigration is a discretionary public policy. Its primary purpose, since our founding, is to advance the interests and security of the nation.

Second Principle: No Amnesty or Mass Guest-Worker Program
The 1986 amnesty was a failure; rather than reducing illegal immigration, it led to an increase. Any new amnesty measure will further weaken respect for our immigration law. Therefore, all amnesty measures must be defeated.

Laws against illegal immigration must be enforced, if they are going to act as a deterrent. Redefining illegal aliens as “guest-workers” or anything else is just that: a redefinition that attempts to hide the fact it is an amnesty, not reform.

Third Principle: Protect Wages and Standards of Living
Immigration policy should not be permitted to undermine opportunities for America's poor and vulnerable citizens to improve their working conditions and wages. The need for guest workers must be determined by objective indicators that a shortage of workers exists, i.e., extreme wage inflation in a particular sector of the labor market.

The current system accepts self-serving attestations of employers who seek lower labor costs as protections of American workers. True reform requires an objective test of labor shortage demonstrated by rising wages to attract more American workers.

Fourth Principle: Major Upgrade in Interior Enforcement, Led by Strong Employers Penalties
Employers who knowingly employ unauthorized workers are the magnet that attracts illegal entry into the U.S. These employers are complicit in the illegal alien cartel activity of smuggling, trafficking, harboring, and employing and must be punished. We must reform the current system by enforcing employer sanctions and fully punishing employers who break the laws of this country. These punishments will be fines, jailing for repeat offenders, and loss of corporate charters.

Employers who knowingly or unknowingly employ illegal workers must be weaned off of their growing use of such workers by assuring a level playing field for all employers and demonstrating effective enforcement actions against employers who continue to exploit illegal workers. No U.S. industry has jobs in which there are no American workers. If illegal workers are decreased over time, wages offered will rise to attract back more American workers. Real shortages, as noted above, can be met with short-term temporary foreign workers.

The Basic Pilot Employment Verification program must be made mandatory and at no extra cost to employers.

Effective immigration enforcement on the border and the interior of the country requires that staffing, equipment, detention facilities, and removal capabilities be adequate to fully meet current needs. The measures needed to identify and remove illegal aliens will also remove the ability of potential terrorists to operate freely in our country as they plot the next catastrophic attack on our people.

Fifth Principle:  New Asylum seeker laws
 Both refugee and asylum status are forms of humanitarian protection offered by the United States.

Asylum policy should work to provide temporary protection here for persons to work for positive change back home. The goal is to strike a balance between providing protection for those who need it while encouraging people to - where possible - stay home to work for positive change.

Asylum policy should be integrated with refugee policy to create a single, unitary statutory scheme. Asylum standards should not create incentives for persons to "get within U.S. jurisdiction first" with the expectation of preferred treatment over similarly situated persons overseas.

Because asylum grants allow an alien to line-jump in front of millions of other people, the grant must be made with care, consistent with the statutory scheme. The management of asylum policy must take into account the enormous worldwide migration pressure, the long waiting lists and backlogs, and the incentives that exist to gain residency through false claims. Someone wiser than I speculated "if only refugees are admitted then everyone will become a refugee."

Asylum should not be viewed as an alternative to regular immigration.

Asylees should not be subject to preferred procedural and legal standards that give an advantage to the would-be asylum-seeker to get to the U.S. in order to make the claim. The "credible fear" pre-screening standard for summary return should remain in the law and be actually used by the government.

Asylum seekers should be expected to make a claim for protection at the first available opportunity in the first country of refuge. Asylum claimants should not forum shop or otherwise be allowed to pick and choose where they make their claim-passing through several safe-haven nations before getting to the U.S.

The legal standards for asylum must be consistent with our international obligations. There should be some "State Action" at the core of the claim of persecution. The newly evolving standard that allows claims to be made on the basis of an alleged absence of state protection for entire classes of "social groups" is fraught with peril as unmanageable and an invitation to fraud.

As a practical matter, under our current system, adjudicating asylum claims often involves allegations of abuse that took place tens of thousands of miles away; objective evidence may be entirely lacking and the entire claim may rest on a subjective judgment of the Asylum Officer. Where the procedural, legal or evidentiary standards become unworkable or an invitation to fraud, it is up to Congress to intervene to re-assert the proper standards to insure a manageable program.

Use the other provisions adopted in 1996 to reduce the ability of immigration lawyers to continue to seek sequential reviews of removal orders until they find a sympathetic judge and to use an asylum claim as a defense against removal if the alien has been living illegally in the United States for more than a year without initiating an asylum claim. These changes were adopted to redress the imbalance in favor of the asylum applicant at the expense of the American public.

The asylum process is still being used as a backdoor route for gaining illegal residence in the United States is the fact that the number of asylum applications is on the upswing again. From the 32,000 in FY'99, the number jumped by about 28 percent in FY'00 to nearly 41,000.

In addition, the INS has no system in place to assure that the denied asylum applicants ever leave the United States. There is every reason to believe that these persons who have been trying to take advantage to the generosity of the American people stay on in the country illegally and hope to gain legal residence by enactment of another amnesty for illegal aliens.

The invitation for false claims is compounded by the now unmanageably broad definitions of who is an asylee. The problems presented by broader and broader definitions of who can get asylum is sending this country into new and uncharted waters, especially over the question of who qualifies for a claim based upon membership in a particular social group. The asylum standard codified in U.S. immigration law in 1980 was based on the internationally accepted refugee definition. Whether a person had been persecuted or had a well-founded fear of persecution if repatriated could be evaluated reasonably objectively when the criteria turned on the persons' race, religion, nationality or political opinion. Congress judged in 1980 on the basis of past experience that the maximum number of asylum claimants in a year would not reach 5,000, so they set that as a ceiling. However, experience has taught us what we should already have known: "if you build a new avenue for admission, they will come." By 1990, more than 15,000 approved asylum applicants were waiting in a backlog, and Congress doubled the annual ceiling.

Another part of the explanation involves legislative and judicial expansion of asylum coverage. The congressional action occurred with the addition to the asylum definition of China's family planning policy as a form of political persecution by Sec. 601 of the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRAIRA).

FAIR expressed it's concern that this change in the law would be another loophole phenomenon, i.e., that it would lead to an increase in fraudulent Chinese asylum applicants. We have been proven correct. In FY'96 there were 1,509 Chinese asylum applications. In FY'2000 there were 5,541 Chinese applications. There would have been even more except the United States began intercepting Chinese smuggling ships and diverting them to ports in neighboring countries where the smuggled Chinese could not gain entry making asylum based on claims of fear of family planning persecution.

Increasingly over the past several years, asylum has been granted to people claiming to fear generalized social customs or conditions, such as female circumcision, and even social ostracism based on sexual orientation, disease or disability. While these practices are at best inconsistent with Western notions of decency and at worst reprehensible, they hardly fit the intended definition of political persecution as contemplated by the Geneva Convention or our other international obligations. The expansive nature of asylum grants over the past several years have moved us from the murky area of rendering judgments about the actions of foreign governments to the even murkier area of judging social and cultural practices that are at odds with our own. Asylum law has deviated from cases where there is direct State Action in perpetrating persecution to the hazy area of a government's alleged generalized failure to provide certain protections for marginalized groups.

It forces the United States into a position of passing judgment on social practices and cultural mores in every society on earth. If ostracism due to sexual orientation is grounds for asylum, how is a line to be drawn to exclude asylum claims from women who in Islamic societies are required to wear veils, or denied the right to drive a car or work outside the home? At that point asylum ceases to be a mechanism to protect the persecuted, and becomes a process of imposing our values on others or using the asylum law to obtain "legitimacy" for some international cause.

In a world of 6 billion people, most of whom live under political systems and cultures that leave a lot to be desired, real world conditions mean we must be selective in granting asylum protection.

The objective we should be striving to achieve is continued assured protection for asylum applicants who fear persecution from governments or from organized non-governmental elements that are oppressing people with the tacit backing of their government, while discouraging the abuse of the American people's hospitality and compassion. We believe that three reforms would serve that purpose.

The first of the reforms would decouple the grant of asylum from permanent residence. International practice demonstrates that there is no standard requiring us to grant permanent residence to asylees. There is no reason that a bona fide asylum applicant can not be admitted as a nonimmigrant with the right to work in the United States. That status should not be adjusted to permanent residence until after a minimum of five years. There is no reason that a person who has shown the resourcefulness to get to the U.S. to ask for asylum should be accorded welfare benefits and other public assistance that should be reserved to our most needy citizens. As international circumstances change, the asylum status should be periodically reviewed to determine whether the original circumstances that led to the asylum grant have been reversed. In that case, when the fear of persecution is no longer valid, the asylees should be required to return home. Similarly, an asylum grantee should face a presumption that a fear of persecution no longer exists if he or she travels back to the home country.

The advantage of the adoption of this reform is that it would discourage the still sizable number of asylum applicants who see asylum as a way to permanent residence in the United States, even if their main objective is not the public assistance that comes with a grant of asylum.

The second reform proposal is an amendment to the refugee and asylee definition to delete the reference to "membership in a particular social group." This change would preserve the scope of asylum protection for the traditional range of persecution, i.e., for race, religion, nationality and political opinion, while ending the expansion of asylum claims into areas of social policy never intended by the framers of the law. Asylum claimants should be judged by the same standards as persons screened as refugees overseas.


The third proposed reform is to put an end to the quasi-asylum status of Cubans who arrive illegally in this country. The Cuban Adjustment Act is an anachronism of the Cold War that treats all Cubans as if they were fleeing persecution. In our current practice, we recognize that is not the case any longer. Those Cubans who are intercepted attempting to enter the United States illegally are given the opportunity to request asylum and are given a hearing if they present a convincing case that they have been persecuted or will be persecuted if they are returned to Cuba.

However, most of the intercepted Cubans fail this test and are returned to Cuba, where follow-up programs have convincingly demonstrated they are not subjected to persecution. If the Cuban Adjustment Act is abolished, Cubans will be put on an equal footing with Haitians and all others who arrive illegally in the United States and seek to stay. They will have to present an asylum claim, and if they are not entitled to that protection, they will be removed.

Even if this reform were not inherently logical in it's own right ( which it clearly is ( it is essential to restoring the even-handedness and fairness of our asylum policy. It will assure persons from other countries who today are denied the opportunity to stay in the United States accorded only to the Cubans - that our policy is not discriminatory against them.

Legitimate, merits-based refugee and asylee admissions deserve our highest priority and attention.

Sixth Principle: Immigration Time Out
A moratorium on all other immigration should be immediately adopted pending true comprehensive immigration reform. We should abolish the extended relation preferences.   If Congress had the power to pass legislation and alter the citizenship status of America's indigenous population without a constitutional amendment, Congress can also pass new laws to take away the citizenship of anchor babies.

Seventh Principle: Merit Based
The President says his plan would use "an easy-to-navigate, point-based selection system" to determine eligibility.

"You will get more points for being a younger worker, meaning you will contribute more to our social safety net. You will get more points for having a valuable skill, an offer of employment, an advanced education or a plan to create jobs,"

Trump said. His plan wouldn't change the total number of green cards offered annually, Trump said, but would increase the proportion allocated to skilled workers.

"We want immigrants coming in. We cherish the open door that we want to create for our country," he said. "But a big proportion of those immigrants must come in through merit and skill."

However, assessing “merit” is difficult. A system that deliberately excluded low-skilled workers might raise labor costs in industries that rely on those workers, increasing prices for consumers but boosting wages for workers.

Supporters of a merit-based system point to Canada and Australia as models. The two countries assess who is eligible to enter the country by using a point system based on factors like education and employment history—the more points, the greater the likelihood of entry. Trump, for his part, has regularly cited Canada and Australia as models for the United States to follow.

In the United States, there’s a need for both high-skilled immigrants and low-skilled immigrants across industries, a need for tech workers in Silicon Valley and a need for laborers in the agriculture industry. But while the administration has not released a plan for what its merit-based immigration system would look like, Trump has implied that he would prioritize high-skilled workers.  It might look like this.

“It is a basic principle that those seeking to enter a country ought to be able to support themselves financially. Yet, in America, we do not enforce this rule, straining the very public resources that our poorest citizens rely upon,

“The argument for high skilled as opposed to low skilled is two fold,” Pres. Trump said. “One is the perception that if you’re going to think of which kind of immigrant has the bigger potential to push outward the frontier of knowledge in this country, it would be high-skilled immigrants; two, they’re also economically beneficial in the sense that high-skilled immigrants are much more likely than low-skilled immigrants to pay higher taxes and to receive fewer services.”

Michael Fix, the president of the Migration Policy Institute, argues that there’s a place for high-skilled and low-skilled immigrants, adding that over time immigrants do quite well in the economy. For example, the first generation and their children will indeed generate fiscal costs at the state and local level, but that changes with the second generation. “If you look at the second generation and higher and their children—as adults then [as] children of immigrants—[they] pay higher taxes and use fewer benefits than other natives and than other immigrants,” Fix said.

Eighth Principle:  DACA is unfair
DACA is the pinnacle of non-enforcement; not only does it protect illegal immigrants from deportation, it provides benefits that by law are reserved for American citizens.

The executive order ‘DACA’ did not obey or follow The Constitution and The Rule of Law.
Let’s be clear, it is not a law, it was a temporary executive order passed by Barack Obama in June 2012, to help young illegal immigrants brought to this country by their illegal immigrant parents. This comes after he had promised to give legal residence to an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants living today in The United States. Since Congress did not agree with his promise, Barack Obama came up with ‘DACA’ executive order.

The president of The United States, Donald J. Trump announced the end of the executive order ‘DACA’ (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) on September 5, 2017.

Many American families today still struggle to pay for their children’s college tuition.  It finally got The President’s attention to do something about it. Donald J. Trump asked Congress to re-evaluate ‘DACA’, since no action was made, President Donald J. Trump announced the end of ‘DACA’ on September 5, 2017, With the intention to get The Congress attention to re-evaluate ‘DACA’ and to find a way to make it legal.

He made it very clear that it had to respect and follow The Constitution and The Rule of Law. The President also gave Congress a six month period to resolve the situation, And 30 days for ‘DACA’ beneficiaries to apply for a new 2 year extension period.

Do you really believe that ‘DACA’ is a fair deal for both countries, or just the perfect scam created by Barack Obama as a gift for Mexico to take advantage of us hard working Americans? The answer is very clear. It only benefits illegal Mexican students living in The United States.