“The Hard To Employ”: Do People Ever Change?

 

“The Hard To Employ”: Do People Ever Change?

Michael Bernick, Forbes 

Do people ever change?

It’s a question professionals in the job training field have been asking over the past five decades, especially in regards to the unemployed workers referred to in the 1970s as the “hard-to-employ”. It’s a question that is being asked today, in Congressional discussions over the reauthorization of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA), and direction of America’s job training system.

In 1979, when I started in job training, the “hard-to-employ” was the term then used by practitioners and employment researchers to describe a set of groups identified with the rising government benefit rolls and crime: welfare recipients, ex-offenders, out of school unemployed youth, and ex-addicts. Within these groups, some workers lacked vocational skills or basic literacy skills that made job placement difficult. Mainly, though, these workers were defined at the time by behaviors: inability to get to work regularly and on time, inability to manage issues in their personal lives that got in the way of the job, inability to follow work protocols. The term became a shorthand for the individuals who, in the words of a blue ribbon committee on the hard-to-employ in 1980, “have become a considerable burden to themselves and the public.”

Integrating these workers into jobs is one of the main goals of the WIOA reauthorization. But how to do so? Much of the WIOA discussion is focusing on longer term training and certifications for these workers prior to job placement. Yet in terms of fostering behaviors for job success, a different approach offers greater promise: direct job placement with high-touch supports, and subsequent skills upgrading. Workers are encouraged to build a track record in entry level jobs, and employers encouraged and incentivized to invest in these workers, with skills upgrading and advancement opportunities. Let’s briefly explain.

Behavioral change that enables individuals who have not had success in jobs to find such success is a complex, multifaceted process. Such behavioral change most often comes from influences outside of government training programs.

This behavioral change can come from the influence of a new mentor/teacher/friend, or an effective mental health/substance abuse intervention. It can come through joining a religious or spiritual movement.

Beyond these influences, often it comes through the process of aging and greater maturity.

A few weeks ago walking in San Francisco’s Union Square, I ran into a participant in the job training program, the San Francisco Renaissance Center, that I was part of in the 1980s. After not holding a steady job in his twenties, he has been employed steadily for the past thirty years in building set up and security positions with the San Francisco Convention Center and Union Square Business District. What brought change in his work behavior was neither the Renaissance Center nor any other training program. His work behavior changed as he aged and matured. So too other Renaissance Center participants settled into jobs on their own as they aged into their thirties and beyond.

A well-structured job training program, though, can be an influence for behavioral change and hastening integration into a more steady job world. Experience suggests that the WIOA authorization focus on the following three strategies:

1. The power of job placement and the “work first” approach:

One of the most important insights on behavioral change has come from Peter Cove, who in 1984, with his wife Dr. Lee Bowes, founded America Works. Inspired by President Johnson’s call to end poverty, Cove in 1965 had dropped out of graduate school and taken a job with the War on Poverty oversight agency in New York. Within a few years, though, he began to lose faith in the welfare and social service approaches and the flow of money without any accountability.

Cove turned to the job training field and went to work in the early 1970s at the Manhattan office of Wildcat Services Corporation. He would later recall, “At Wildcat we showed that the best way to get clients off welfare was to get them paid work immediately, rather than enroll them in training and education programs. I saw with my own eyes the value of work—any kind of paid work—in reducing welfare dependency and attacking poverty. I learned that if we helped welfare clients get jobs, even entry level jobs, they would then attend to their other needs. By contrast if the government gave them money and other benefits they were likely to remain dependent.”

Cove and his wife Dr. Lee Bowes launched America Works with their own funds, and built on the Wildcat results. They emphasized a “work first” behavioral approach: once people are placed in jobs they often find ways on their own to address other “static” or challenges in their lives. “When some mothers on welfare came to us they often explained that they could not work because they had no day care. We would send them on a job interview, and when the company wanted to hire them, miraculously they found a grandmother or daycare center.”

America Works has grown to a nationwide organization, serving 20,000 clients annually. It accompanies job placements with a range of counseling and case management supports for retention. It encourages skills upgrading and skills certifications for advancement. But its theory of behavioral change is centered on the power of the job placement.

Though America Works is among the largest of the “work first” workforce intermediaries, it is by no means the only one. The strategy is increasingly being adopted by other intermediaries, sometimes with variations through the growing apprenticeship movement and creative uses of transitional jobs.

2. The craft of the job counselor and the high-touch needed:

I’ve written from time to time about job counselors who are true craft persons in their roles in assisting the hard-to-employ, including Amy Ruddell, a job counselor in Sacramento, who works in job placement for the homeless. She has been in the field for 34 years, and developed strong ties with local employers, and a willingness and ability to sell her clients to employers. She also has the effective mix of empathy, enthusiasm, and straight talk, to be the cheerleader and coach that her clients need for their transitions into jobs.

When I wrote about Amy in early 2022, she had just completed a project cycle of 30 homeless participants, among whom 19 had been placed in entry level jobs. Since then, Amy has continued to regularly send participant updates. Today around a third of the participants placed in 2022 are back to being unemployed. The others, though, are still employed—though several have changed employers one or two times.

Amy provides the high-touch supports required for placement and re-placement. She checks in regularly with the participant and employer, and seeks to resolve job issues that arise. If there is no resolution, she will assist the participant in finding another job. She is not a nine-to-five counselor, and she does not give up easily on her clients.

The high-touch strategy is also finding greater adoption in the workforce field, as represented by MDRC’s Individual Placement and Support model and its growing Center for Applied Behavioral Science.

3. Advancement from entry level jobs:

In the 1970s and 1980s, the welfare rights groups would argue that welfare recipients and other workers on government benefits should not be expected to take low-wage, entry-level jobs. They were entitled to “quality jobs”. The result in most cases was that the workers obtained no jobs at all.

One of the first principles of job placement is that it is always easier to get a job if you have a job. Also, it is easier to navigate the job world and advance into a better position if you have a job, even an entry level job. The next job training system should encourage workers, with limited job backgrounds, to build a record in an entry level job, and seek out opportunities to advance. It should find ways to encourage and assist employers to provide such opportunities and invest in their entry level workers who perform well. In the post-pandemic economy, employers are finding just how hard it is to find committed employees in entry level positions.

Recent research by Burning Glass Institute points to the advancement opportunities increasingly available for entry level workers at America’s major companies. One challenge for the job training system going forward is how to expand these opportunities in mid-size and smaller firms.

Still, How Little We Know of Behavioral Change and Fitting Into the Job World

Our understanding of behavioral change is still primitive, in regards to the job world, as in other areas of life. Throughout the past five decades, job training practitioners and researchers have looked to the ascendant behavioral sciences for answers on integrating the “hard to employ” into jobs, but the answers have been scarce. If anything, during this same time, the neurosciences have been showing how much of behavior is linked to brain structure, and not easily subject to the mainstream behavioral interventions.

But these past five decades have also shown the power of getting and holding a job in stimulating behavioral change—at least for a portion of the “hard to employ”. This power should be at the center of WIOA reauthorization.

Michael Bernick I served as California Employment Development Department director, and today am Counsel with the international law firm of Duane Morris LLP, a Milken Institute Fellow and Fellow with Burning Glass Institute, and research director with the California Workforce  Association. My newest book is The Autism Full Employment Act (2021).2093

With Guardians Like These

 

A big part of the problems we face...

With Guardians Like These

Chuck Schumer’s recent comments about Israel exhibit arrogance and ignorance.

Joel Zinberg, City Journal https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-problem-with-schumers-israel-speech

Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer has long claimed to be a shomer—Hebrew for guardian or watchman—of Israel and the Jewish people. But his speech last Thursday on the Senate floor, in which he called for new elections in Israel, more readily brings two Yiddish words to mind.

The first word is chutzpah, which connotes arrogance-laced presumption. That perfectly describes Schumer instructing Israel—the only democracy in the entire Middle East—to jettison its elected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and hold new elections, or else. Schumer threatened: “[i]f Prime Minister Netanyahu’s current coalition remains in power after the war begins to wind down . . . then the United States will have no choice but to play a more active role in shaping Israeli policy.” That is election interference, plain and simple.

The Israeli people are quite capable of deciding when to hold elections and whom to elect, notwithstanding Schumer’s insinuation to the contrary. No foreign politician—even, or especially, one who prefaces his remarks with “as a Jew” and “a life-long supporter of Israel”—has any business interfering with an ally’s democratic processes. Critics might point to Netanyahu’s 2015 address to Congress opposing the proposed Iran nuclear deal. Democrats were livid at the time. But Netanyahu was arguing against a specific agreement that many Americans, and most Israelis, believed posed an existential threat to Israel and the world. He was not advocating for President Obama’s ouster.

Schumer claimed Netanyahu is “allowing his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel.” But does anyone doubt Schumer is ditching Israel to save Joe Biden by placating his party’s radical left? Unsurprisingly, Biden praised the speech.

The second word is sechel—common sense or wisdom—something Schumer’s speech clearly lacked. The Senate majority leader claimed that the Israeli people are being “stifled by a governing vision that is stuck in the past.” But the only people stuck in the past are those, like Schumer and the foreign policy establishment, who persist in wanting to impose a two-state solution that Palestinians have never favored and that Israelis, brutalized by decades of intifadas and terrorism culminating in October 7, have given up on.

Schumer identified the four obstacles to peace as Hamas and “the Palestinians who support and tolerate their evil ways,” Netanyahu, right-wing Israelis, and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. This ignores how Palestinians over the years have rejected multiple opportunities to form their own state. Indeed, polling just prior to October 7 found that nearly three quarters of Palestinians oppose a two-state solution. Reuters reports that 72 percent of Palestinians “support and tolerate” Hamas, believing that its October 7 attack was “correct.”

If Israel ends its war to eradicate Hamas, as Schumer urges, the country would be rewarding the atrocities of October 7. Hamas, the Palestinians who support them, and their useful idiot supporters in the West who chant, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine shall be free,” all want a land that, to use the Nazi term, is Judenfrei—cleansed of Jews. Hamas has pledged to repeat the horrors of October 7 and kill as many Jews as possible. If Hamas is not destroyed, peace of any kind will be impossible.

Instead of coercing Israel, Schumer should pressure the international community to withdraw support from the aged and corrupt Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas—now in the 18th year of his four-year term and disliked by 90 percent of Palestinians. Moving on from Hamas and Abbas is the only way moderate Palestinians might come forward as partners for peace. Israelis will reckon with Netanyahu and his failure to protect their country at a time of their choosing. Meantime, the self-styled shomer should bite his tongue.

Joel Zinberg M.D., J.D.  Dr. Zinberg was senior economist and general counsel at the White House Council of Economic Advisers, 2017-2019.

Taking On the College Cartel

Taking On the College Cartel

Frederick M. Hess & Michael Q. McShane, Law and Liberty 

The venerable economist Milton Friedman once said, “Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change.” That’s the impulse behind Winston Churchill’s admonition (later famously echoed by Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel): “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” Well, welcome to the world of American higher education. Crippling tuition, bloated bureaucracies, huge rates of noncompletion, campus groupthink, DEI loyalty oaths, grade inflation, enrollment cliffs, and stretched institutional budgets have all added up to a crisis of confidence—inside higher education and among the broader public. 

Trust in the nation’s colleges has been crumbling for the better part of a decade. In 2023, Gallup reported that just 36 percent of American adults said they had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of trust in higher education. Among Republicans, the share of adults who trust colleges plummeted from 56 percent in 2015 to 19 percent in 2023. But it wasn’t just a right-wing thing. Among independents, the numbers plunged by a third, from 48 percent to 32 percent, and among Democrats, trust declined from 68 percent to 59 percent.

There is a challenge here—and an opportunity. 

Policymakers who are troubled by this state of affairs but unsure how to respond may be inclined to look to the K–12 playbook, thinking that what’s needed is a strong dose of “school choice for college.” But the truth is that American higher education already features an extraordinary degree of choice. Pell Grants, the GI Bill, and many state scholarships essentially operate as vouchers for low-income students to attend the school, public or private, of their choice. Heavily subsidized federal student loans can also be used at nearly every institution of higher education. And yet, for all this, the higher education landscape is a mess.

It would be a profound mistake to read this as an indictment of educational choice. Rather, the problem is that anti-competitive practices have been allowed to stymie robust, healthy competition and fuel the self-dealings of campus mandarins.

What’s needed today is a heavy dose of trust-busting, deregulation, and entrepreneurial energy.

Busting the Accreditation Trust

Federal policymaking over the past half-century has mostly focused on subsidizing higher education. Pell Grants, institutional aid, and the student lending program have provided vast sums to cover or underwrite tuition, plumping college coffers while expanding their consumer base. In order to guard against waste and fraud, these programs have relied on a system of college accreditation that has, ironically, served to further protect incumbent institutions and encourage bureaucratic bloat. 

For an institution of higher education to receive federal funds (including Pell Grants and subsidized loans), it must be accredited. The problem is that accreditors are trade associations operated and funded by the colleges they oversee. This means they’re essentially a legally sanctioned, publicly funded cartel. Mediocre colleges keep their accreditation even as they overcharge and underperform. Meanwhile, new and nontraditional entrants must leap over enormous hurdles just to get started. 

The current system isn’t suited to facilitate competition and creation. However, some form of oversight is necessary as a matter of fiduciary responsibility. The obvious solution is to build on the Trump administration’s efforts to create room for new accreditors that are less entwined with the cartel and more hospitable to new providers. This is eminently doable: Under existing law, the US Department of Education can recognize new accreditors not beholden to the same entrenched interest groups.

The Postsecondary Commission (PSC) offers one intriguing approach. PSC seeks to adapt the K–12 model of charter authorizing to higher education by focusing more on outcomes than on inputs and compliance. PSC founder, Stig Leschly, says that the goal is to stop counting faculty or campus materials and instead judge colleges based on economic returns, transparency, accountability, and innovation. To be accredited by PSC, institutions need to track and report short-term results like rates of graduation, year-to-year retention, and job placement. Over the longer term, they would need to track student labor market outcomes and calculate graduates’ earnings—as compared to a counterfactual estimate of what they would make had they not attended the institution—minus the cost of attendance. Such a system rewards institutions that build programs and approach staffing with a focus on outcomes and ROI—a development that, in turn, should have the happy effect of squeezing out the ideological stylings that have proliferated at institutions where students or faculty have too much idle time and too little focus. PSC is an example of the type of forward-thinking activity that could allow for the emergence of new accreditors, and thereby new colleges, that are less beholden to the unworkable status quo. 

The College Shakedown Racket 

But there is an even more insidious trust lurking just under the surface of American higher education. Employers use college credentials as a hiring requirement—whether they’re demonstrably relevant to the job in question or not. This practice took off after the Civil Rights Act of 1965, when it became increasingly dicey for employers to use other kinds of hiring tests. The Supreme Court warned in the early 1970s that college degrees shouldn’t be treated any differently than any other hiring requirement, but nonetheless, they have been given exactly that kind of carve-out—making them a safe haven for risk-averse HR departments and employment attorneys. The result is that employers who are fearful of screening based on knowledge or skills will casually demand a diploma even for jobs that don’t truly require one. These paper credentials have become admission tickets to the middle class that must be purchased from existing institutions of higher education.

It’s time to level the playing field. Students should enroll in college because they want to or because they need specific training, not because it’s the only way to ensure they’ll get a fair look from potential employers. There are several ways to reduce employers’ reliance on college degrees. First, the courts should subject college credentials to the same kind of scrutiny applied to any other hiring test. Degrees should be required only if they’re demonstrably related to the work at hand. Meanwhile, there’s a need to devise reliable, credible, legally sound hiring tests that can offer an appealing alternative to college credentialing for applicants and employers. Public officials have a unique opportunity to lead on this issue. Indeed, they should take a page from red and blue governors like Larry Hogan in Maryland and Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania and eliminate degree requirements for most state government jobs, thereby requiring that positions be filled based on skills and experience rather than paper credentials.

Higher education is ripe for a new era of institution building. Choice works when new, better alternatives force lazy, self-indulgent incumbents to raise their game or risk obsolescence.

The merit of a college education isn’t the point. The issue is that today an arbitrary judicial standard, an excessive regard for employer convenience, and an unwillingness to stand up to the college cartel mean that Americans are required to pay the ransom of a college diploma in order to seek professional success. Compelling Americans to buy an expensive degree of dubious value is behavior more typically associated with protection rackets than engines of opportunity.

Public Scams and Public Subsidies

Higher education is also rife with dubious practices that reward influence peddling and shower massive public subsidies on unaccountable providers. Some of these practices especially advantage brand-name institutions, while others insulate the broader sector from the consequences of its failings. 

Today, wealthy families who make influence-peddling “donations” to help grease the admissions skids for their children are allowed to write off the full amount as charitable contributions. This is nonsensical. After all, the IRS has long held that donors can only deduct the value of their contribution minus the value of any good or service they receive in return. This makes obvious sense: An exchange of goods or services is not a charitable contribution. Yet the IRS currently ignores the quid pro quo when it comes to admissions. Elite schools shake down wealthy families to pad their endowments and insulate themselves from market pressure. They then gift seats to donors’ children at the expense of their more deserving peers. Taxpayers pick up the tab as donors buying access wind up illegally deducting 50 percent or more of these “charitable contributions.” That publicly subsidized institutions engage in such influence peddling is particularly galling given the leaders of those same institutions are prone to go on at great length about the evils of privilege and their commitment to equity.

There is also a general lack of institutional accountability for publicly provided funds. Colleges admit students and, as long as they’re enrolled, keep pocketing taxpayer dollars—directly in the form of Pell Grants or indirectly through federally subsidized loans. If the student never graduates, the college keeps all that money. The student leaves with no degree but all the debt. When students don’t repay their loans, taxpayers are on the hook for the balance. Now we are seeing the frustration over accumulated debt fuel a political push for loan “forgiveness” that sticks taxpayers with the tab for hundreds of billions in borrowed funds, even when those funds simply serve to alleviate financial pressure on colleges whose students have no degrees or earnings to show for all the time and money they spent there.

Institutions that accept public funds should be expected to make taxpayers whole for the tuition and fees they’ve collected from students who don’t repay their loans. This would create intense pressure on colleges to help ensure that students complete their degrees and find gainful employment. It would also likely make colleges more cautious about whom they enroll. That’s a good thing. Admitting students who are unprepared for college and then pocketing tuition from them isn’t good for anyone.

Building New Institutions

Dynamism used to be the norm in higher education. Americans weren’t stuck with the institutions we inherited. Rather, we built new institutions in response to changing needs. Between 1820 and 1899, 672 new colleges were established in the US. Of those, 573 were private. That’s an average of more than a half-dozen new private institutions each year. During the second half of the nineteenth century, private donors founded 11 universities that are today ranked among the nation’s top twenty, including such famous names as Stanford, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Chicago. We’ve fallen out of this habit. In recent decades, donors have steered big gifts toward old, inflexible institutions and given short shrift to new entrants.

Much of that nineteenth-century dynamism was born of the millionaires produced by the Industrial Revolution. They saw a need for new institutions attuned to the changing needs of the economy and society. Today, the deep-pocketed donors born of the Information Age have seemingly concluded that it’s foolish to build from scratch when there are already so many prestigious institutions. Instead, they direct their giving to existing schools, ballooning endowments and erecting new buildings while further entrenching familiar brands. Nearly $60 billion was donated to higher education last year, with close to a quarter of that flowing to just 20 institutions.

Higher education is ripe for a new era of institution building. Choice works when new, better alternatives force lazy, self-indulgent incumbents to raise their game or risk obsolescence. Long lists of rules, regulations, and subsidies have yielded a higher education landscape that’s neither responsive nor responsible. It’s time to look for institutions that can do better.

Deep-pocketed donors would do well to focus on underwriting new entrants rather than cutting eight-figure checks to erect buildings, stadiums, and new initiatives at institutions busy squatting atop ten-figure endowments. We’re seeing this kind of pioneering spirit play out with the promising new University of Austin. And there’s great value in creating quasi-autonomous new units at universities to provide a home for heterodox scholarship on civic virtue, American history, and the Great Books (as at Arizona State and the University of Florida). It shouldn’t be either-or. We need a wave of such efforts.

In time, of course, these new institutions may themselves lose their way or get captured. But that simply strengthens the case for building a steady supply of new ones. This requires a shift in how we think about the tension between tradition and dynamism in higher education, where the former impulse has usually won out. Big donors troubled by the status quo should refuse to subsidize bad behavior and instead invest in new institutions—whether those are focused on workforce preparedness, the liberal arts, or anything in between. 

Looking Forward

There’s much more to be done, of course. In our new book, Getting Education Right, we explain the need for both structural changes in higher education and a renewed commitment to rigor, free inquiry, and the telos of the enterprise. However frustrated we may be with higher education today, it’s a mistake to reduce colleges and universities to social media punching bags. Whatever the manifold failings of performative professors and slacker students, higher education plays a vital role in safeguarding human knowledge, promoting scientific inquiry, and teaching wisdom to the next generation. 

We can’t afford to merely lament or critique the woeful state of higher education. We need to pursue changes that will help colleges and universities better fulfill their purpose. As Friedman, Churchill, and Emanuel would remind us, there’s a lot of silver in those clouds. Finding it requires institutions of higher education to honor their mission and serve as beacons of knowledge, understanding, and wisdom for the students they serve today as well as those yet to darken their doors.

🐝 Millions of British Kids Forced to Live Normal, Happy Lives

🐝

Millions of British Kids Forced to Live Normal, Happy Lives After UK Bans Puberty Blockers

Experts warn that without delayed puberty, British kids will grow normally.

The Babylon Bee, Patriot Post 

LONDON, UK — The National Health Service of the United Kingdom announced Monday they will no longer permit children to be prescribed puberty blockers, a move many gender-ideology advocates worry will force otherwise depressed and troubled kids to live normal, happy lives.

“This is a travesty and an outrage,” gender activist and purple hair aficionado Clara Domino told reporters. “Without puberty blockers, kids with mental disorders will be forced to receive actual, data-driven treatment that might actually lead them to grow out of their gender dysphoria and become happy, healthy adults. This is the opposite of what the transgender movement stands for.”

Experts warn that without delayed puberty, British kids will grow normally and likely spend their days doing delightful British kid things, such as neighborhood games of Conkers, Poohsticks, or Tiddlywinks.

The NHS cited a growing body of research that outlines the harmful side effects of such treatments. Advocates for transing kids and teens rebuked the move and said it might lead to kids growing up, getting married, having a family, and being normal, productive members of society.

“How can we deny kids their right to make permanent, life-changing medical decisions based on one or two short doctor appointments?” Domino said. “If we can’t get them when they’re kids to buy into the idea that they’re ‘born in the wrong body’, how will we be able to do it when they’re older and their cerebral cortexes are fully formed? This is trans genocide!”

As of publishing time, gender-ideology advocates took to the streets in London to protest the decision and announced they plan to look for new, more creative ways to sneak sterilization drugs into the healthy bodies of kids and teens. 

An Immigration Crisis Beyond Imagining

 

An Immigration Crisis Beyond Imagining

Todd Bensman, Imprimis 

Center for Immigration Studies

The following is adapted from a talk delivered on January 22, 2024, at the Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship on Hillsdale’s Washington, D.C., campus, as part of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series.

In 1960, the Eisenhower administration began counting the number of foreign nationals “apprehended” or “encountered” by what was then called the U.S. Border Control when crossing into the U.S. over its southern border with Mexico. These figures have been published and closely monitored through the years, and there has never been anything like the numbers we are seeing now. A human tsunami of previously unfathomable size—Border Patrol has had to handle more than 7.6 million border crossers in 36 months—has smashed every record, with each year’s numbers exceeding the previous year’s record in stair-stepping fashion.

Of the over 7.6 million illegals encountered by Border Patrol since January 2021, the number allowed to stay inside the U.S. is somewhere north of five million. But with the percentage of those allowed to stay now approaching 100 percent, if current trends hold, the total allowed to remain in the U.S. under the Biden administration will reach ten million by next January.

The U.S. has experienced surges of illegal immigration in the past, but these have been brought quickly under control by implementing policies to deter, block, detain, and deport illegal immigrants. Not this time. To put the current numbers in perspective, consider that Jeh Johnson, President Obama’s Director of Homeland Security, told MSNBC that in his time in office—when the number of illegal crossings was relatively low—he considered it bad if apprehensions exceeded 1,000 a day, because anything more than that “overwhelms the system.” Over the past three years, apprehensions have averaged about 6,940 per day.

Even with a surge in illegal crossings in 2019—this was due to a legal loophole that encouraged illegals to cross with minors—the Trump administration had brought apprehensions down to between 800 and 1,500 a day in his final year in office, the lowest numbers in 45 years. Four months into the Biden administration, apprehensions spiked to about 6,000 per day. There were 2.4 million apprehensions in 2022, a daily average of 6,575. In 2023 there were three million apprehensions, a daily average of 8,219. Entering 2024, apprehensions were up to 12,000 to 15,000 per day.

The reality is even worse, because these numbers do not include the people who entered the U.S. illegally without being apprehended—sometimes referred to as “gotaways”—a number the Border Patrol estimates but does not make public. That estimate over the past three years is two million, bringing the three-year total of illegal immigrants to ten million—a number equivalent to the population of Greater London or Greater Chicago.

But these are just numbers. Who are these people? They are internationally diverse: 45 percent come from 170 countries outside the traditional origin countries of Mexico and Central America. Many are unaccompanied minors: 448,000 to date. More than 330 as of November 2023 are on the FBI’s terrorist watch list. Many are murderers, rapists, kidnappers, and violent criminals. More than a million have been lawfully ordered deported by judges in the U.S. but remain in our country regardless. The dismissal by the executive branch of our government of hundreds of thousands of cases of immigration law violations is unprecedented.

It is worth noting some other firsts: Mexico’s crime syndicates and their paramilitary forces have never earned so much money from cross-border smuggling, and it is reported that their proceeds from human smuggling are surpassing those from drug smuggling for the first time. Never before have the Border Patrol’s 19,000 agents been ordered to abandon vast stretches of the border to conduct administrative intake duty. Never have so many immigrants died to take advantage of policies that all but guarantee quick release into the U.S. Never has our government explicitly refused to enforce immigration laws requiring detention and deportation of illegal immigrants on the grounds that those requirements are cruel and inhumane—instead adopting ad hoc policies aimed at providing “safe, orderly, and humane pathways” into the U.S. for illegal border crossers. And never has there been anything like the current conveyor-belt policy to distribute millions of illegals throughout the American interior.

This crisis is not the result of incompetence, but of purposeful policies. What is more, America’s establishment media has largely abdicated its duty to report on the crisis, refusing to acknowledge an event that is having a greater impact than almost any other in the world today. One can only assume that the reason for this is partisan bias: after all, the crisis can easily be traced to an identifiable moment in time—Inauguration Day 2021.

Prior to that day, the Trump administration had brought the southern border largely under control using four key policies.

1. Diplomatic Big Sticks: The U.S. gained Mexico’s cooperation by threatening ruinous trade tariffs of up to 28 percent on Mexican goods. We gained the cooperation of Central American nations by threatening to freeze U.S. foreign aid. The cooperation of these countries consisted of two things: accepting deported illegals from the U.S. and using their military and police to block incoming immigrants at their own borders.
2. Remain in Mexico: Border Patrol was required to return apprehended immigrants immediately to Mexico, where they had to wait out the long duration of asylum processing, rather than releasing them to disappear inside the U.S.
3. Safe Third Country: Immigrants who had passed through designated “safe third countries” (including Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico) on their way to the U.S. without applying for asylum in one of those countries were automatically deported with no chance to claim asylum in the U.S.
4. Title 42: This pandemic-control health order required rapid deportations to Mexico, without the option to claim asylum, of all immigrants caught illegally crossing the U.S. border.

During the 2020 campaign, candidate Biden promised to undo Trump policies within the first 100 days, to include ending detention and deportation of illegal immigrants. On January 20, 2021, he began to follow through. Four new U.S. policies and a new Mexican law are the chief drivers of the immigration tsunami we see today.

1. The tariff threat against Mexico was withdrawn and full foreign aid to all Central American nations was restored, freeing these countries to end cooperation with U.S. efforts to stem illegal immigration. This marked the end of the Remain in Mexico policy.
2. The Title 42 pandemic rapid expulsion policy was waived for most families with children under ten, for all unaccompanied minors, for pregnant women, and for many single adults from nations that would not accept deportees.
3. Two days after the 2020 election, the Mexican government passed a law prohibiting the detention of families, pregnant women, and unaccompanied minors. It then released thousands of families from 58 Mexican detention centers ten days before President Biden took office.
4. The Biden administration established an ad hoc Border Patrol turnstile honor system by which Title 42-exempted families and others were released into the U.S. with a promise to report back later; this catch-and-release approach came eventually to incorporate the aforementioned conveyor-belt policy, with Border Patrol delivering illegals to non-governmental organizations that would arrange bus and air travel to cities around the U.S.
5. To give the false impression of fewer illegal crossings, the Biden administration created an ad hoc system that allowed hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants to use a cell phone app called CBP One to schedule “pre-approved” entries at border crossings and U.S. airports.

Those who seek to come to the U.S. illegally are rational actors. They are more willing to pull up stakes and come when they think the effort and expense will pay off. The typical cost for the dangerous journey is $10,000 per person paid to smugglers. Few will take the gamble when the odds are against them. It’s a different matter when the odds move dramatically in favor of success as they did in January 2021.

Toward the end of the Trump administration, Border Patrol used Title 42 to deport nearly 90 percent of apprehended illegals. The Biden administration immediately reduced that number to 60. By 2023, Title 42 deportations were down to 35 percent. And on May 12, 2023, the Biden administration formally ended Title 42, and with it all instant expulsions. U.S. intelligence had predicted that ending Title 42 would lead to between 14,000 and 18,000 crossings a day, and that prediction turned out to be right. As I recently reported, it appears that the Biden administration recently took steps to reduce these numbers—most likely in response to public outrage in an election year—though it remains to be seen how long this will last.

It is too early to gauge the full impact of the ongoing settlement of millions of illegal foreign nationals in the U.S. We know that the initial financial cost is high—$400 billion, by one estimate, to feed, house, clothe, and resettle the illegals who have been allowed to stay. Then there is the burden placed on public school districts that have no choice but to take in millions of new children who often speak no English and whose educations are not commensurate with those of their schoolmates. It is probably not coincidental that hospital systems across the nation have fallen deep into the red since the great mass migration crisis began. And large cities across the nation are looking to Washington for help with unfunded and unexpected fiscal burdens reaching into the tens of billions to care for the hundreds of thousands showing up with hands out.

Expense, of course, is only one part of the equation in terms of impact. Public safety, criminal justice, and national security systems face unprecedented new burdens as the personal histories and criminal backgrounds of most of the millions allowed easy entry are unknown and, often, unknowable. Some percentage will commit crimes and—in addition to the often horrendous effects on the victims of their crimes—increase the load on our already over-burdened courts and prisons. One prays not, but some may also commit acts of terrorism. Last but not least, this great influx will increase joblessness and put immense downward pressure on wages for American workers.

It is not rocket science to figure out how to solve the immigration crisis. Nor is it hard to tell whether a politician is serious when he proposes a solution—one can simply ask whether the proposal will increase or decrease the odds that an aspiring illegal immigrant will decide to make the significant effort and financial sacrifice. For instance, in the ongoing standoff in Texas, placing razor wire at the border as the Texas Governor ordered done will clearly decrease the odds, and removing the razor wire as the Biden administration seeks to do will increase the odds. Similarly, any politician who proposes a solution that begins by granting amnesty to illegals currently in the U.S. is increasing the odds and not serious.

There are two essential steps we must take to begin to solve the border crisis:

1. Enforce current immigration law, specifically the requirements under the Immigration and Nationality Act to detain and deport illegal entrants.
2. Restore the threat of trade tariffs on Mexican goods to ensure Mexico’s cooperation with reinstituting the Remain in Mexico policy, forcing asylum seekers to stay in Mexico while their asylum claims are processed.

Three additional steps will help to solve the problem:

3. Withdraw from the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees treaty, which requires the U.S. to meet outdated standards for handling asylum claimants; then institute an asylum law that ends the current catch-and-release system and requires that an asylum claim first be made in a suitable departure or transit country, such as Mexico.

4. Put diplomatic and financial pressure on Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, and Mexico to implement their own policies of detention and deportation of foreign nationals who are in those countries illegally.

5. Close loopholes in U.S. immigration law such as the Flores Settlement Agreement—which circumvents Immigration and Nationality Act requirements for detention and deportation during asylum claims and forces the release of asylum-seeking families within 21 days—and the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008, which requires the quick release of immigrant minors if they are from anywhere but Mexico.

Our politicians know these actions are the ones needed. The problem is not a lack of knowledge but a lack of political will. Too many of our elected leaders have selfish reasons to let the border crisis continue, no matter what their constituents demand. Whether they will be able to continue in their inaction is in the hands of the American people.

Todd Bensman is a senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies. He earned a B.A. from Northern Arizona University, an M.A. in journalism from the University of Missouri, and an M.A. in security studies from the Naval Postgraduate School. A former counterterrorism programs specialist with the Texas Department of Public Safety, he worked for 23 years as a journalist, including for The Dallas Morning News, CBS, and Hearst Newspapers, and had assignments as a foreign correspondent in over 30 countries. A recipient of two National Press Club Awards, he writes for numerous publications, including Homeland Security Today, the New York Post, The Federalist, and The National Interest. He is the author of Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History.

Gearing Up for ‘Biden’ Versus Trump

Gearing Up for ‘Biden’ Versus Trump: Not If, But When and How to Replace Biden

If Trump can praise those he defeats, call for unity, and campaign in 50 states in non-Republican strongholds, then he can win.

Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness 

President Joe Biden is declining at a geometric, not an arithmetic, rate. His cognitive challenges are multifaceted.

His gait is shaky. His daily use of stairs now risks the chance of a tenure-ending fall. Even when he sticks to the teleprompter, he so slurs his speech, mispronounces words, and glides his syntax that at times he becomes as incomprehensible at the podium as he is unsteady in his step.

He now speaks a strange language foreign and untranslatable to most Americans. White House transcribers leave hiatuses in their written texts of his remarks to reflect that they either have no idea what he said, do not wish to publicize their guesses at what he said, or do not wish the public to know what he was trying to say.

Despite the circling-the-wagons media and the passive-aggressive sycophants like the opportunistic Gov. Gavin Newsom in waiting, the left understands that Biden will be lucky to get to the August convention. This spring and early summer, he will not campaign as a normal presidential candidate, and this time around, there is no pretense of the COVID epidemic to excuse his absence.

The people have already polled numerous times that their president is unfit to serve now and, in the future, should not run. So the 2020 Faustian bargain is in shambles. Remember its quid pro quos: all the major Democratic presidential candidates of 2020 nearly simultaneously pulled out the primaries to coronate Biden—but only on the condition that Biden would play to the hilt his “ol’ Joe Biden from Scranton” schtick that would offer a veneer to the otherwise unpopular hard left agenda of the new Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren/the Obamas/Squad Democratic Party.

The people voted for a “return to normalcy,” all while the left destroyed the southern border, unleashed a critical legal theory/George-Soros crime wave, dismantled hard-won deterrence abroad, and printed money to spur hyperinflation.

Moreover, it is increasingly clear that the entire Biden family consortium is compromised and corrupt. Neither Hunter nor Jim nor Frank Biden had any consulting skills, business expertise, or corporate experience to warrant leveraging over $25 million from foreign interests. Their only commodity was to sell corrupt parties the appearance that Joe Biden would be quite willing to help their various causes if they enriched his family. Everyone knows that to be true, and only now, as Biden sinks into incoherence, are his protectors shrugging about the obvious money-making schemes that revolved around a corrupt senator, vice president, and private citizen, Joe Biden.

None of Biden’s record is popular. His policies on the border, economy, energy, foreign policy, and crime poll below 50 percent. And this trifecta of Biden’s mental deterioration, family corruption, and failed presidential record will only grow worse.

Then there is the Kamala Harris issue—the Spiro Agnew insurance policy of our age that so far has protected Biden from overt efforts to replace him. She is as unpopular as Biden and often as incomprehensible, but without the excuse of age or mental diminishment. Of all the major Beltway elected officials, only Sen. Mitch McConnell polls worse.

By August, Democratic donors and politicos may well conclude that the only way to rid the party of both is to release Biden’s delegates, open up the convention, and let candidates fight over the now-free delegates. Harris then will not be nominated, but not through a backroom, Machiavellian removal of a black woman. Instead, she will “fairly” lose an “open” and “transparent” free-for-all of various Democratic want-to-be replacements and recede into a sober and judicious Mike Pence-like retirement.

The problem with this scenario, of course, is that late-season convention or post-convention machinations in the modern era don’t work out too well. In 1976, Ronald Reagan, after losing a series of early primaries and being declared nearly inert, suddenly caught fire and entered the August 1976 Republican convention in Kansas City within striking distance of incumbent Gerald Ford. President Ford, remember, had never been elected either president or vice president.

In the end, in one of the most acrimonious Republican conventions in memory, a wounded Ford won the nomination by only 117 delegate votes out of some 2,257 cast. In some sense, Ford never recovered and lost the election to Jimmy Carter, even as the tumult gave Reagan the exposure and his team the experience needed to win the nomination in 1980.

About two weeks after the 1972 Democratic convention, a desperate George McGovern and the Democratic hierarchy removed Vice President running mate Sen. Thomas Eagleton from the ticket due to revelations of little-known past electric shock treatments given to combat depression. After futile efforts, the Democrats settled on the Kennedy clan’s Sargent Shriver, who had never run for office. McGovern would have lost anyway to an incumbent Nixon. But the margin of defeat in one of the greatest landslides in presidential history was often attributable to the sheer chaos of changing a vice presidential candidate so late in the campaign.

In sum, the Democrats can—and may have to—replace Joe Biden, and they can ensure that Kamala Harris is not the nominee, but the means of doing so will be chaotic and messy and will wound the winner for the rest of the campaign.

Trump’s Circuitous Path to Victory

Donald Trump challenges have now been discussed ad nauseam, and they are threefold: he must either beat or postpone campaign-season court trials—and find perhaps $800 million to $1 billion to post bonds, pay interests on them, and meet gargantuan legal fees—without turning off donors and supporters and by avoiding the diversion of Republican National Committee and various campaign funds to his own personal defense.

As in the past, Trump will be vastly outspent, perhaps by 3-1 or 4-1. Molly Ball’s infamous Time 2022 essay outlined the left-wing scheming that ensured a mail-in/early balloting election by aggregating the deep state, the corporate boardroom, the social media monopolies, and the 2020 riotous street thugs of Antifa and BLM. What she called a “cabal” and “conspiracy” was designed not so much as a one-off to defeat Trump as to create a permanent system by which a Trump-like candidate could never win a presidential election, both in 2020 and afterward.

Given changes in the 2020 state voting laws that saw 60-70 percent of the ballots in many swing states not cast on Election Day, while the rejection rate of faulty ballots counter-intuitively plunged despite such an influx, Trump will have to win by 3–4 points. Otherwise, in the swing states, we will again stare at the late-evening televised wizardry in which his huge leads mysteriously melt on the screen as drop boxes and mail sacks are tallied.

To achieve a 51-plus majority in the popular vote—no Republican has achieved such a national ballot margin in 36 years since George H.W. Bush beat Mike Dukakis in 1988—Trump will have to win, or win back, more Independents, apostate Democrats, and RINO Never-Trumpers.

He can do that in only two ways:

One, he must hammer away at Joe Biden’s disastrous record on the border, energy, race, foreign affairs, the economy, and social issues that scare moderates and fence-sitters, especially when comparisons are made to the achievements of 2017-2020. Inner-city residents are being tag-teamed by both the influx of thousands of illegal aliens who apparently have first claims on stretched social services and street criminals who loot, assault, and carjack mostly their law-abiding neighbors with impunity.

Two, Trump needs to model his remarks after his Iowa Primary victory speech or his recent Fox Townhall event with Fox’s Laura Ingram. Translated, that means there is no reason to reference Nikki Hayley’s deployed husband, to refer to her as a “birdbrain,” or to say much of anything other than she will lose, and in the process, she is needlessly hurting more than half of America by draining resources away from the only real chance to repeal the current socialist agenda.

Hayley is imploding without any need for a Trump push. Magnanimity, rather than salt in her self-inflicted wounds, is the better strategy to unite the party. Trump has cemented his base. He will increase his share of minority voters who have been hurt the worst by the Biden socialist agenda. But to ensure victory and a Republican Congress, he cannot give swing voters a reason not to vote for policies and initiatives that they overwhelmingly prefer over those of the now hard-left Democratic Party.

In sum, after Super Tuesday, when Hayley will either quit the race or become inert, Trump needs to call her, politely remind her of her promise to support the nominee, and welcome her back into the fold. If she is wise, she will likely agree to disagree, let bygones be bygones, and thus pledge to support the assured nominee, Trump.

Two of her three choices are in her own interest: 1) She endorses him, and Trump wins, and she is vibrant in 2028; 2) she endorses him, and Trump loses, and she is still viable; 3) she opposes him, and Trump either wins—and she is persona non grata—or he loses, and she is blamed for splitting the party and his defeat. Breaking her public promise to support the nominee will bleed what support she retains, and would prove a suicidal blunder.

Trump has achieved the greatest political comeback since Richard Nixon arose from the ashes of defeat in California in 1962 to win the nomination and presidency in 1968. Trump’s Phoenix-like rebirth from January 2021 to the present was achieved by Biden’s failure, the natural empathy accruing from the weaponization of the law by partisan or corrupt prosecutors against him, and Trump’s greater success in giving independents fewer reasons to vote against him. If he can praise those he defeats, call for unity, and campaign in 50 states in non-Republican strongholds, then he can win—even despite the hatred of the left, the corruption of the media, the weaponization of the bureaucracy, and the eroding trust in the way we vote.

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004, and is the 2023 Giles O'Malley Distinguished Visiting Professor at the School of Public Policy, Pepperdine University. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush, and the Bradley Prize in 2008. Hanson is also a farmer (growing almonds on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author most recently of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, The Case for Trump and the recently released The Dying Citizen, and the forthcoming The End of Everything (May 7, 2024)..