Despite a booming stock market, there are signs of trouble afoot. For one, the labor participation rate is at a 50-year low (adjusted for the pandemic), with one million Americans exiting the labor force over the past year. Combined with layoffs driven in large part by the AI transition and inflationary pressures tied to the Iran war, the lawful immigration system still heavily favors 1990s to mid 2000s-style insourcing and outsourcing of American jobs.

The Trump administration has attempted to address this — by way of court-challenged executive orders. But for lasting change, voters ought to adopt the “radical realism” challenge.

American presidents, both Republican and Democrat, have a long history of buckling to corporate demands for cheaper labor. Famously, President Obama at the height of the 2008 financial crisis, attempted to justify the continued onslaught of H1-B visa workers in an early Internet-based town hall meeting, all but admitting to the outspoken wife of an out-of-work Texas engineer that it did not align with his corporate sources that American high-tech talent was actively being displaced.

The United States continues to admit 85,000 H1-B visas per year. Whether or not staffing companies have real jobs to offer foreign workers, they often seek the maximum number of slots allotted under federal law. This has given rise in the tech sector, among other STEM occupations, to “body shops” — firms that exist solely to pump foreign nationals into U.S. jobs from foreign countries such as India and Pakistan.

Perhaps nowhere is a better case study in cause-and-effect than Texas, which aggressively positioned itself as a low-cost alternative to Silicon Valley. Seemingly overnight, the State has seen sharp rises in foreign-born populations, affordable housing has largely dried up in places like Collin County, and now among “Red States” it leads the country — behind only “Blue” New York, Illinois and California — for newly built mosques and Muslim-centric housing developments.

In response to criticisms, the Trump administration attempted to impose a $100,000 visa worker tariff to deter companies from over-reliance on imported labor. However, the reality is that this penalty can’t survive merely as an executive order. In June a court blocked the H-1B tariff, forcing the administration pivoted to a new strategy, targeting the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program. This would levy a $100,000 fee to foreign graduates from U.S. universities before they transition to an H-1B visa.

Over the years, bipartisan bills have proposed that staffing firms have actual jobs to offer H1-B visa workers — as opposed to the practice of “benching” as many H1-B visa holders as possible. Congress could fix this “body shop loophole” by enacting three specific legislative changes:

• Ban Third-Party Placement: Congress could mandate that an H-1B visa can only be granted to an immigrant who will be employed directly by the company filing the paperwork. This single rule change would make it entirely illegal for a staffing agency to claim a visa slot and then “lease” that worker out to a client like a bank or tech giant.
• Replace the Random Lottery with the Random Audit: Instead of picking names out of a hat, Congress could legally require U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to allocate the 85,000 visas based on merit and salary. Visas would go to the highest-paid positions or the most highly educated graduates first, subject to randomized audits to ensure that Fortune 500 employers genuinely have no domestic alternatives. Under this system, entry-level outsourcing applications would be pushed to the bottom of the pile and receive zero visas. This would preserve lower level career rungs needed to give American-born job seekers the toehold they need to move up.
• Prioritize U.S Graduates: The U.S. is a higher education destination for top talent globally. Consequently, the corporate claim that we fail to produce enough qualified labor is highly suspect. If this is genuine problem, it is a self-imposed one: To the extent foreign-born students pay higher tuition rates, universities are incentivized to admit fewer American-born students into impacted programs in medicine, engineering and other STEM fields. To remedy this, Congress could pass a bill that removes the financial incentive for schools to bump American applicants in favor of foreign born students. By educating more American-born students, we stave off future talent shortages that perpetuate the vicious labor shortage cycle that employers consistently flag as a justification for more insourced foreign labor.

Rebuild the Degree-to-Employment Pipeline

Congress could move to give first priority for H1-B visas to foreign students who earn their degrees at accredited American universities. This would ensure not only that the visa system aligns with the U.S. higher education system but all but eliminate fraudulent “paper mill” practices in which qualifications are overstated by foreign applicants. However, the Trump Administration has instead moved to cut admissions of heavily-represented Chinese and Indian student populations, another strategy that will no doubt hang up in court.

Congress, on the other hand, has multiple avenues at its disposal to invest in a more accessible labor market for Americans:

• The Federal Grant Offset: Congress could pass legislation tying federal research funding (such as National Science Foundation or National Institutes of Health grants) to domestic enrollment quotas. If a university’s graduate or undergraduate STEM program falls below a certain threshold of domestic students (e.g., 70%), they would lose access to millions in vital federal research dollars. This would instantly make the financial cost of displacing Americans higher than the tuition premium gained from foreign students.
• Equalized Tuition Subsidies: Congress could create a federal matching-fund program for high-impact STEM fields. Under this model, the federal government would pay universities a direct subsidy for every domestic student enrolled in an “impacted” engineering or medical program, effectively making up the financial difference between in-state tuition and the international cash premium. This would neutralize the financial benefit of prioritizing foreign applicants.
• Strict International Enrollment Caps: Following models used by other developed nations, Congress could amend the Higher Education Act to place a hard legal ceiling on the percentage of international visa holders (F-1 students) allowed within any single university department. By implementing these structural fixes, the U.S. could break the cycle where American tax dollars subsidize world-class university infrastructure, only for that infrastructure to prioritize foreign nationals who are then used by corporations to suppress domestic wages.

Humanize HR Automation

An often-overlooked component in the labor participation rate crisis consists of the automation practices adopted by human resources departments. Applicant Tracking Software came into widespread use on the heels of the Great Recession. Per a 2021 Harvard study, ATS serves to keep ~30 million job seekers on the sidelines as a consequence of common “knockout criteria” such as employment gaps lasting six months or longer. In essence, those counted by the federal government as workforce dropouts are very often forced into this position. (Worse yet, many employers put a premium on hiring from among the already-employed — essentially “have a job to get a job”.)

While employers have attempted to dispute these tough-luck automated screening practices, ATS has been implicated in excluding upwards of 75 percent of applicants before human eyes set sight on any given résumé. As a result, top advice for job seekers is to network — relentlessly.

The axiom “It’s not what you know, but who you know” is more literal than many appreciate. The odds of winning a Las Vegas slot machine payout or lottery win of some amount — excluding top prizes — are orders of multitudes better than landing a job purely based on a job board posting, which amounts to only a 0.4 percent chance.

For every 1,000 cold online applications submitted, a job seeker can mathematically expect an average of about four job offers. Taken together with H1-B visas, AI-driven restructuring and the “ghost job” phenomena in which employers advertise for positions that are not, in fact, available, it is no wonder we are seeing labor participation rates unequalled since the stagflation-meets-hippie era!

Solutions on the hiring side of the equation include:

• Transparency as Time Management: If an employer only wishes to hire from among the currently employed or the recently unemployed, state so up front. There are only so many hours in a day for HR staff to process applications and for job seekers to carefully craft résumés and cover letters. Why solicit for applicants one intends to screen out via legal but non-transparent means, particularly in a day and age when internet job postings are flooded within a matter of hours? Time is money — so the ethnical and efficient response is to state hiring goals up front.
• Regulate HR Automation: While there is no doubt that ATS and AI will continue to play a role in hiring going forward, its application should be subject to guardrails. If, for example, an applicant applies more than twice to the same position in a calendar year, it should trigger a manual review. Similarly, the days of sending an application into the digital abyss ought to be subject to ethical if not legal limits. Legitimate employers should configure an auto-responder to confirm that a job is legitimate, how to receive accessibility accommodations and to reflect whether the role is, in fact, slated to be filled as opposed to “expanding the talent pool” (ghost job) — and, finally, to provide general information on what to expect next. Given the rise in bots and job scams, communication should no longer be overwhelmingly one sided.
• Workforce Preservation: Levy tax penalties on Fortune 500 companies that make rapid shifts toward H1-B visa reliance, offshoring or AI without just cause. Redirect tax penalties into grants for displaced workers to retrain and cover their transitional living expenses, on a means-tested basis.
• Job Seekers’ Bill of Rights: While states have taken measures to improve the balance of power between employees and employers — such as the right to request and receive personnel records — similar efforts should be made to encourage the unemployed not to give up. Elements could include but are not limited to a right to know whether ATS/AI will be leveraged to screen applicants (e.g. what is a passing score), right to know if the employer is actively hiring vs. a ghost job; right to know if “social credit scores” are in play for a given position; a requirement for job boards to take reasonable measures to verify job postings to reduce scams and bot-generated content; the ability for online job seekers to specify how long their personal information remains on file with job boards or career portals; up-front disclosure of salary ranges; right to request demographics-in-hiring data from staffing agencies to better understand if they are speciality focused (e.g. H1-B visa or DEI driven vs. general recruitment); right to know via a written request what percentage of jobs a Fortune 500 company has insourced or outsourced over a 10 year period; access to a DOJ-funded ombudsman embedded within major defense contracting firms and Fortune 500 company corporate headquarters to address barriers to workforce retention and reentry caused by age, disability or prolonged workforce absence; and an email or text-based auto-response on the part of employers to confirm receipt of an application and to address frequently asked questions.

Education and Family as National Security

Education is vital not only to our economic future but the securing of American national security interests. In 2016 and even as recently as the 2024 elections, President Trump’s supporters very much anticipated that school choice would become a reality. Much like immigration reform, the gulf between rhetoric and reality has yet to narrow.

The U.S. spends more per capita on K-12 students, yet consistently sells itself short. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which issues “The Nation’s Report Card,” has tracked long-term erosion in student literacy over the past 20-some years. The U.S. is ranked 26 globally for mathematical proficiency, while lagging behind Singapore, Ireland, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan in reading proficiency. In impoverished inner city school systems, the proficiency gap is even wider — leading to the decades old conundrum of generational poverty and the so-called school-to-prison pipeline.

As AI and the social justice push to limit immigration enforcement converge to make competition for available jobs, housing and living wage employment even more fierce, adopting an incentives-based approach to educating the next generation of American labor must become a top priority.

We do not have the luxury to overlook the pessimism that has been blamed in recent years for keeping many working age Americans on the sidelines. If the labor participation rate continues to crumble, the U.S. will face a crisis so profound that the tax base will no longer keep pace with servicing the national debt — currently $40 trillion with $1T in interest added every ~100 days.

For as complex as these issues may seem, there are practical solutions:

Education Reforms

• Targeted School Choice: Give parents more control over where their children attend school. Income and area code should not decide a child’s potential. In low performing areas, allow parents to reclaim tax dollars for their children. A selective implementation of school choice will incentivize public schools to improve performance on behalf of at-risk populations, while neutralizing critics’ concerns that universal vouchers will entrench advantages more affluent families already have.
• Reward Proactive Parenting: Offer tax breaks to middle-income Americans for student performance. Offer enhanced welfare eligibility for single parent households for enrolling children in high-performing after school programs that emphasize academic achievement or vocational skills. Make childcare costs fully tax deductible. Incentivize marriage and family — to offset below-replacement birthrates, which are eroding away the tax base — by making first-time parents eligible for income-qualified student loan repayment reductions.
• Reward Excellence in Education: Offer financial bonuses to teachers and schools for better performing students, while also implementing roving classroom audits to ensure that gains are made through honest means and, conversely, to identify root causes of low performing schools through parent-teacher-whistleblower feedback mechanisms. This solution could potentially be funded through lottery funds — which would also serve to address the fact that in most States lottery funds have been diverted into general fund spending, at a loss for schools. Locking funding exclusively to merit-based bonuses bypasses this legislative shell game, instead rewarding performance-based outcomes.
• Elevate Early Intervention: The brain is amazingly adaptive, particularly early in life — even for children with special needs. In view of rising autism rates — which now impacts one in 20 male American-born children and one in 70 females, per the CDC — early interventions for at risk children should not just be a priority for parents. It’s a taxpayer issue too, as children who do not become independent ultimately become dependent on entitlements. This crisis could be addressed by creating a bridge between the Department of Education and the National Institutes of Health, dedicated exclusively to funding scientific research and early childhood interventions — to fund programs in public schools and/or through public-private partnerships, again with incentives tied to improved quality-of-life benchmarks.
• Prepare for the Future: Leverage Bureau of Labor statistics and employer surveys to fund vocational training programs in schools, and to identify academic vs. trade learning paths, among middle school students. Emphasize public-private partnerships to give graduates the best chance of landing on their feet in an in-demand career. Subject school districts that cut “electives” only to over-invest in others to increased public oversight.
• Maximize Merit: During the pandemic, many colleges and universities dropped the SAT/ACT entrance exam requirements. The practice also came to be recognized as a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion measure. But it has not done students any favors. In May 2026, hundreds of University of California professors signed a petition, admonishing the board of reagents to bring back entrance exams after revealing that they are taking up valuable academic time teaching remedial math to incoming students. Meanwhile, high performing minority students resent the DEI implication that if they got ahead, they did so because they caught a break — not because they worked hard or exhibited talent.
• Promote Realistic Expectations: Compel universities to publish a disclosure of what majors are in demand and their estimated earnings potential, in comparison to those that are not. Emphasize proportionality. Either A) cap the amount of federal funds students can borrow for “lifestyle majors” that do not correspond to labor market demands, or B) cap what institutions are permitted to charge for majors that are rooted in a “classical education” rather than earnings power (e.g. a philosophy degree commands ~20 percent less tuition than an engineering degree).
• Student Loan Relief: Make student loan debt dischargeable in bankruptcy under select circumstances, such as a disability that substantially impairs daily functioning or documented caregiving of a disabled or elder family member or special needs child. (Rather than encourage people to walk away from their obligations, this will incentivize individuals to lift the burden of someone else who might otherwise become a burden to the system, in exchange for means-tested financial relief.)
• Follow the Money: Foster transparency via outside audits and make the results available for public inspection. Cap foreign money pouring into higher ed endowments, some of which may account for why liberal academia has developed a “radicalized” reputation. Foreign money may not only serve to displace American students but serve to make top universities more “socialist friendly”, ensuring that foreign students from China are not indoctrinated with Americanized (Capitalist) values. Address this by leveling the playing field so that universities do not prioritize higher-paying foreign student admissions while Americans change majors because they can’t gain entry into impacted STEM programs. This will serve the dual purpose of addressing foreign influence operations on college campuses and a driver of American STEM labor shortages, which for 30+ years has been used to justify increasing numbers of H-1B workers — despite the fact that the U.S. is an international higher ed destination and should be capable of supplying the workforce. 

Healthcare Costs:

• Streamline: Address the Affordable Care Act in recognition that there are too many middlemen (e.g. pharmacy benefit managers) created by Obamacare, which have served to significantly drive up costs. 
• Reroute Subsidies: Give federal subsidies to American households rather than their insurers, on a sliding scale (needs-based) basis.
• Reduce Wage Suppression: Make it possible for small businesses to fully deduct the costs they incur to offer benefits, such that there is less pressure to lowball wages to offset rising healthcare costs.
• Pricing Transparency: Outlaw deceptive business practices that inflate costs to game insurance and Medicare reimbursements. Encourage transparency and competition. Require healthcare providers to disclose the costs of services up front — like any other customer-facing business — rather than hiding behind procedural codes and “You’ll find out when you get the bill”.
• Individualized Options: Allow middle-income consumers not otherwise covered by employers or income-qualified public benefits to buy policies that more closely align to stage-of-life: If they are not of childbearing age or do not need gender affirming care, they should not be forced to pay for “one size fits all” policies that are priced according to the needs of highest-cost patients.

Farm and Home

• Foreclosure Prevention: Mandate that mortgage lenders devote ~1 percent of every mortgage payment to a national fund to help distressed homeowners (foreclosure prevention).
• Housing Security: To offset the coming Social Security and Medicare cuts within the decade, considering limiting landlord’s ability to raise rents on fixed-income seniors and the permanently disabled in exchange for market-rate differential property tax deductions.
• Food Security: Protect ranchers and family farms from land grabs (eminent domain) and politically-motivated efforts to make food production inordinately expensive for consumers (e.g. to collapse livestock production and force consumers into lab grown meat or insect protein alternatives).
• All in the Family: Exempt private landowners whose primary use is to produce food for public consumption from estate taxes.
• Responsible Land Management: Reduce tax obligations and/or extend loan forgiveness to land owners who reduce chemical reliance, and who utilize methods to improve soil health without forever chemicals.

Medicare and Social Security: 

• Extend Solvency: Means-test Social Security and Medicare eligibility to forestall cuts to low-income retirees for as long as possible (multi-millionaires and billionaires who won’t miss the money). 
• Permanent Tax Relief: Stop taxing fixed-income recipients on Social Security. Leave federal dollars in their pockets. 
• Retirees First: Abolish the practice of Social Security payroll funds redirected into the general budget. Remove mandatory reductions for failure to reach full retirement age for benefits among the disabled and critically ill.
• Clean Up the Books: “Sunset” all noncitizens from public benefits. (This isn’t “racism” but reality: At $40T in debt with $1T in interest tacked on every ~100 days, we can’t afford to be the world’s keeper.) 
• Share Burdens: Incentivize seniors to remain independent in their own homes and to help solve the housing crisis by renting out a room or an ADU. Alternately, combat the assisted living facility shortfall by arranging for live-in help in exchange for room and board on the part of a family member or friend, as a “Safer at Home” incentive for seniors. These incentives could exist in the form of property tax or estate tax exemptions.

Tax and Entitlement Reform: 

• Tax Reform Now: The tax code is more than 46,000 pages long. Rather than simply hike taxes across the board in a way that the wealthy will largely avoid by paying CPAs and tax preparers to exploit loopholes, “tax the rich” via targeted tax reforms that fuse the best elements of the flat tax and fair tax models to eliminate the use of numerous shell companies and offshore tax havens, while also reducing fraud and waste.
• Citizen Supervision: Modeled after the Peace Corps, randomly seat volunteer citizens’ oversight panels to the FDA, Centers for Disease Control, Veterans Administration, Department of Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency, among others.
• DOGE: At the national level, codify periodic randomized outside audits of key parts of the federal government, such as the Federal Reserve, State Department, Pentagon, Veteran’s Administration and the Social Security Administration.
• Affirm the Nuclear Family: Nurture a pro-family environment to reverse the deleterious effects of the Johnson-era War on Poverty, as documented by Thomas Sowell and others for ~60 years. Reform public benefits in such a way that it is no longer financially necessary for the impoverished to game welfare eligibility by remaining unwed. Decades of demographic research prove that children who have the love and support of two parents are less likely to drop out of school or end up in prison. Low-income households should never be forced to make a false choice between marriage and public benefits or single parenthood.
• Childcare: Create a means-tested tax deduction for childcare expenses through age six. Alternately, offer a greater child tax credit for qualifying stay-at-home parents of children under age six and below.
• Choose Your Team: Close the “revolving door” between big Pharma and Big Finance and federal regulatory institutions such as the Securities Exchange Commission and the Food and Drug Administration (e.g. consider a five-year washout period).
• Financial Oversight: Restore the Depression-era firewall (Glass-Steagall Act) between commercial and investment banking, not only to safeguard against systemic “too big to fail” risks but to promote financial investment in Main Street America.
• Critical Infrastructure: Subject to citizen oversight, require basic utilities to be majority-American owned and to a contribute to a risk mitigation “modernization pool”, with which to harden the grid and protect critical services against civilization-ending impacts of natural disaster (e.g. earth-directed solar storms), war or terrorism (e.g. an EMP caused by a nuclear detonation).
• State of Accountability: Eliminate the “honor system” for State oversight of block-grant and similar federal funds. To ensure everyone is on the same page, tie FEMA disaster relief to States’ willingness to deliver expedited access to small business and home loans, mortgage relief and building permits — to offset pressure to surrender of private property to redevelopment firms and investors out of financial necessity.
• Stop the Overspending and Government Shutdown Insanity: Instead of fighting over votes to raise the “debt ceiling” while doing nothing to rein in USSR-collapse level national debts, mandate a return to Regular Order (via a Constitutional amendment if necessary). Replace lazy and non-transparent federal budgeting largely left to Congressional staffers and special interests — who produce thousands of pages in omnibus bills that are voted upon by representatives too rushed to read them. This will achieve two ends: Slow the skyrocketing $40T national debt, which has snowballed ever since Congress abandoned Regular Order in the early 1990s. Secondly, it will keep intellectual lightweights looking for little more than a generous federal pension and personal grift from running for federal office. (If taking the job requires getting down into the weeds of federal budgeting throughout the year, fewer questionable candidates will look to high elected office as a substitute for a real-world résumé.) 

Election Integrity: 

• Secure Elections: A majority of Americans agree: It is not an unreasonable demand to require voter ID at the polls, and one-time proof-of-citizenship to register to vote. Pass the Save America Act or an equivalent.
• Prohibit Automatic Voter Registration: Motor voter laws have repeatedly, per AP reporting and others over the past 20 years, resulted in “glitches” across multiple states in which noncitizens receive election ballots, most recently in New Jersey, even when they have no intent to commit fraud.
• FBI Accountability: In recognition of former FBI Dir. Chris Wray’s decision to ignore a 2020 ballot and driver’s license creation scandal in which China attempted to utilize Americans’ TikTok user data — because admitting to the foreign election meddling would have conflicted with his public testimony to Congress: Make it a federal crime for future FBI directors and State election officials to refuse to investigate credible foreign or domestic threats to our elections.
• Voter Roll Transparency: Subject State voter rolls to randomized, citizen audits as an alternative to jury service.
• Dark Money: Address the “corporations as people” Citizens United fallout, which has driven political donations not just into super PACs but laundering vast sums of money through nonprofits, where donor identities are often hidden. Deploy randomized audits and felony statutory reforms to enforce a firewall between nonprofits and the political process, particularly with an eye toward keeping hostile foreign interests who wish to manipulate our elections by way of largely untraceable influence campaigns (e.g. Neville Singham, an American billionaire in China who allegedly bankrolls socialist propaganda efforts in the U.S.).

Criminal Justice Reform

• Judicial Responsibility: Fast-track the ability to remove judges who let repeat, violent offenders back out on the streets to predate at-risk communities.
• Bail Reform: Outlaw “zero-dollar bail” for repeat, violent offenders.
• Drug Decriminalization: Pass a law at the federal level to penalize States that allow open-air drug use and fail to tie treatment mandates to criminal offenses for repeat offenders (e.g drug court).
• Community Policing: Limit the ability of municipalities to defund police on political grounds.
• Lotto Reform: Make it a federal offense for lottery funds from being redirected into State general funds. Mandate that alternative uses apart from K-12 schools, are narrowly tailored to educational programs for the incarcerated and court-ordered drug and mental health treatment and rehabilitation.
• Protect Our Children: Pass a law at the federal level to impose penalties on States that attempt to reduce penalties for child sex offenders and sex traffickers, who promote early release of high recidivism sex crimes and who attempt to eliminate sex offender registries.
• Community Responsibility: Pass a law at the federal level that imposes penalties for States that defund gang crime units without just cause, and to make it a civil rights violation to cut public safety in at-risk communities.
• Crime Victims: Allow for deportation vs. footing the cost of incarceration for repeat offenders (give crime victims and their offenders a say at sentencing).

Immigration Reform:

When housing, food production and job creation can’t keep up with unnatural population surges attributed to border crisis, everyone suffers not the least of which include migrants, many of whom paid large sums — between $8,000 to $60,000 depending on national origin and age (child vs. adult) — to cartels to smuggle them over the border. The U.S. must move to permanently limit cartel reach into the U.S. by means of human trafficking.

• International Cooperation: Reduce tariffs on countries that cooperate with anti-terrorism and refugee crisis counter measures. Impose an immigration moratorium on countries that refuse to share information necessary to properly vet the undocumented for extremism and organized crime ties.
• Asylum Coaching: Make it a federal offense for NGOs to coach migrants on how to game immigration laws (e.g. to pass “credible fear” screenings at border crossings). Prohibit foreign nationals and NGO-affiliated entities from promoting birthright citizenship and/or advertising for “birth tourism” services.
• Immigration Court: Halt the practice of granting more asylum claims than the Courts can resolve in a 10-year period by mandating that the federal government hire more judges and take other measures to resolve backlogs. Implement AI-augmented standardized metrics to determine which claims ought to be fast-tracked. Forfeit asylum eligibility altogether for those who attempt to evade border checkpoints and ports of entry. End “defensive asylum” eligibility for those subject to final deportation orders who have committed crimes. Prohibit asylum claims for individuals who claim “credible fear” because they are members of rival cartels, terror or organized crime networks. Subject those credibly connected to crime (e.g. gang affiliation visually signified by tattoos, subject to secondary corroboration such as a law enforcement affidavit from the country of origin) to expedited hearings. Impose limits on how often the initial asylum decision can be appealed on procedural grounds. Asylum claims adjudicated after a years-long backlog are evaluated based on conditions at the time of adjudication: the claim will be assessed according to whether the circumstance that triggered the asylum claim continues to exist or has durably and materially changed so that the applicant’s fear is no longer well-founded (e.g., whether the war has ended).
• Immigration Reform: Come up with a permanent Flores (migrant detention) and DACA (individuals brought to the US as young children) solution. Codify “next closest country” asylum rules and self-deportation incentives. Increase penalties for individuals who overstay their visas or use them for non-approved purposes (e.g. birth tourism). End birthright citizenship (Constitutional amendment). Permanently implement DNA testing as it pertains to children in detention centers and at border crossings to ensure undocumented and unaccompanied children are in the care of family vs. trafficked by strangers.
• Immigration and Customs Enforcement: Mandate that ICE to detain and deport criminals and welfare dependents over productive, otherwise law-abiding families providing they are not working under the table and are not missing scheduled immigration court dates.
• Rollback Ponzi Scheme Migration: Address labor market distortions caused by drawing low-skill undocumented workers to Sanctuary Cities where they struggle to find employment in urban areas even as “jobs Americans don’t want to do” in farm labor and manufacturing face shortages. Because these individuals count in the census, their presence converts to additional electoral seats — creating an incentive for sanctuary cities/states to refuse to cooperate with ICE even on the removal of individuals who commit crimes and end up incarcerated. Tackle sanctuary law prohibitions on police, prisons and criminal courts communicating with federal officials as a First Amendment violation; explore novel legal mechanisms under federal law to address Sanctuary laws on RICO or human trafficking grounds; withhold federal funds from States that fail to cooperate with the objective of removing “the worst of the worse” .
• Border Wall Safety: Mandate that the border wall will be completed and maintained; remove prohibitions against states for addressing public safety risks associated with maintenance and repairs. 

The Socialism Trap

It was not uncommon for Democrats to argue, as recently as the Obama administration, that illegal immigration is at odds with unionized labor, depresses wages and promotes abuses on the part of employers. While Democrats backed visa systems to promote farm labor and other specialized uses, they were not what critics call “open borders” proponents.

In 2019, self-identified democratic socialist and former presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders articulated what was then a mainstream assumption: Making the undocumented eligible for public benefits while deprioritizing immigration enforcement is a recipe for disaster.

Sanders named the problem: There is no end to the number of impoverished in the world who will be drawn to American shores if we make them eligible for citizenship-free entitlements. In the face of the fact that Social Security and other basic entitlements are already slated within the decade for depletion, it seems almost paradoxical that the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are gaining traction in major elections even as the baby boom generation sees the last of what our tax dollars can afford to dole out.

Today, Sanders’ contemporaries are in vehement disagreement with what once was once a bipartisan view: Then, borders represented sovereignty and national security; today, they represent racism. Then, immigration enforcement represented the right to living wages, affordable housing, safe streets and humane working conditions; today, it represents xenophobia.

It is not that the modern left is incapable of comprehending that unchecked immigration will eventually overwhelm any and all hopes for bigger, better European-style social safety nets. Rather, leftism comes loaded with a hefty dose of guilt. In the mind of a Marxist, U.S. imperialism demands we fall upon our own sword in a revolutionary act of abolitionist resistance designed, ultimately, to collapse the pillars of capitalism. This does not square with the capacity to fix anything anytime soon — certainly not on behalf of the working class, who stand to live out the remainder of their lives waiting for the end result of “reimagining” the future.

From the 1960s to through the mid 2000s, the notion that a “rising tide lifts all boats” animated the center left. Today, DSA opposition to essentially everything the colonizing West has ever produced is largely only conducive to anarchy.

Is anarchy too strong of a characterization when most Americans would no doubt prefer to blame naivety for the notion that social workers can be dispatched to knife fight or that in a post-ICE world immigration enforcement will be strictly civil without criminal enforcement? Perhaps. But it is no accident that anarchists shadowed Antifa and BLM following the death of George Floyd in 2020. These objectives and outcomes exist on a shared spectrum, driven by the two-faced master that is idealism.

It says something about the times when two important segments of the radical left have gravitated to the terms ‘degrowth’ and ‘accelerationism’ — about as opposite as it could get. — Aaron Vansintjan, “Accelerationism… and Degrowth? The Left’s Strange Bedfellows”.

However one defines the problem, the impulse to throw the baby out with the bathwater is now a driving force on the progressive left — so much so that Senators Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Chris Van Hollen have begun to back “Democrats” without regard for quality or reputation. A Maine candidate for Senate came with a Nazi tattoo, multiple rape allegations and a fake working-class job description as an oyster farmer, while his would-be successor fathered two children by a cousin. Over in Michigan, Van Hollen and Warren exchanged backslaps with an Egyptian-American Marxist who has defended the Muslim Brotherhood and self-describes as a doctor but for which no verifiable state medical license has been identified to date. In Texas, would-be 37-year-old senator James Talarico is gaining in the polls despite a life experience that has yet to reportedly include opening his own personal bank account.

Is desperation really a recipe for electoral success? Judging from the number of DSA candidates who have ridden to victory during recent primaries, quite possibly. How long the honeymoon lasts, is another question.

Judging from the number of DSA candidates who have ridden to victory, quite possibly. How long the honeymoon lasts, is another question.

Reclaim the Dream: Radical Realism

The problem with the pursuit of Utopia — which socialism demands more than most — is that ideological fanaticism has a way of becoming dysfunctional and ultimately bloody. Even if we assume the DSA can peacefully coexist within a Capitalist society, what we are left with for a shift toward collectivism is the same mass of less-than-perfect humanity staring back in the mirror.

Wherever we are, there we are.

Only “radical realism” — a triumph of pragmatism over perfectionism — will allow for the 21st Century to outgrow the philosophical errors of the 20th Century.

The core job of a public servant is to identify both internal and external risks, defend against mutual threats to the public interest, improve transparency and access to critical taxpayer funded services, to budget responsibly and to ensure that the rights of citizens are upheld. These goals require a tireless commitment to rooting out corruption, grift, unfair trade practices, tax and human rights abuses — none of which hinge on identifying as “right” or “left”, “capitalist” or “socialist”.

Radical realism acknowledges that what undermines capitalism in the minds of many is the same phenomena that undermines socialism in the minds of others: Human nature.

Our suspicions are not without cause. The right vs. left dialectic makes mutual use of the unresolved to rally public support. It is not what a political movement fixes that secures their power (success) — it is what remains unaddressed (broken). Why does it work? Because A) those who attain power wish to keep it — not to work themselves out of a job, and B) the electorate is inevitably seduced by the political establishment into one-dimensional narratives in which only the sins of the political opposition are of consequence.

When the only reforms we demand are ones for which someone else is expected to sacrifice, reform never comes. Generations into this standoff, some have concluded the status quo is too dysfunctional to salvage — a fatalism that exists on both extremes of the political spectrum.

If, in fact, the American Dream is out of reach, it bears remembering that much of that dream has been pushed out of reach by unsustainable practices that are by no means unique to the U.S.

Government spends beyond its means, devalues the currency and replaces the buying power of the working and middle classes with inflation. The wealth gap is a direct reflection of the fiscal policies governments implement in order to make it cheaper to service sovereign debt. Meanwhile, financial pressure translates into smaller families and a shrinking tax base — a demographic reality neither socialism nor capitalism solves. Fewer working-age young adults are left to support a greater number of older people, while carrying the operating costs of a government that refuses to downsize. Course corrections come too little too late because those who have come to rely on government for their basic welfare, young and old, resist. With another election on the horizon, elected leaders trade the future for the present. This is the world the next generation inherits. This is why blame transforms into radicalism. This is when we condemn our future to relive the sins of our past — from intractable poverty to world war.

That socialists would enter this vacuum and convince a debtor’s society that redistribution of wealth can solve for Big Government meets Big Demographic Crisis is a Big Lie of another sort — yet false promises resonate at precisely the time we most need a reality check. By the time the problem is identified and people are uncomfortable enough to demand answers, crisis management is the only reasonable offramp.

America is not the only one flirting with disaster. Much of Western Europe has slipped into deep debt — economic pressures for which smaller families are a harbinger. While the Eurozone may appear to offer greener pastures from this side of the pond, more generous safety nets and higher taxes have come at the price of defending themselves, as that job has been recklessly ceded to the American taxpayer.

Is it any accident that Western Europe has become increasingly defined by refugee crisis — scapegoats seemingly prepositioned with the blessing of liberal governments to distract by means of a predictable backlash from the fact that governments are unable to meet basic needs, among them ensuring those in need of medical interventions do not wait months or even years for help? Against this backdrop, economic performance is deemed “relatively strong” even when 13 percent of the working-age population, in growing economies such as Spain, are unable to find employment. Closer to home, Canada not only rolled out Medical Assistance In Dying (MAiD) to terminally ill adults, but has rapidly extended it to persons experiencing homelessness and even children, trends that evoke macabre cost-cutting measures.

After being held up as a model for universal healthcare for years, the same demographic shifts that have been visited upon all debt-ridden Western countries have largely silenced the universal healthcare praise Americans once lavished on Canada.

Today, Denmark and Sweden are the poster children of a working socialist model. The only problem? Scandinavians deny being anything other than market-based economies — perpetrators of the very same capitalism DSA candidates have condemned. So while it is true that residents of “socialist” European countries suffer lower poverty rates, the countries most often upheld as the model have also quietly “pioneered” strict immigration controls to maintain those safety nets — much more aggressively than the American left has acknowledged to date.

The question is not so much whether Denmark and Sweden have adopted socialist branding but whether their approach can be duplicated elsewhere. To this end, what sets Scandinavian countries apart is not their commitment to an ideology — but their cultural bent toward pragmatism and utilitarianism. Plainly stated, they go where the evidence leads — not the politics. That should be instructive for the rest of us: We do not need to adopt a radical platform to shape a better future — we just need to stop apologizing for our own national identity.

If we wish to strengthen the social contract, it does not come with uncontrolled migration, nor the tired old right vs. left excuses. Nuts-and-bolts reforms will not satisfy the grandiose visions of would-be revolutionaries. It will not score establishment points, either. In fact, doing good by our neighbor and our country may be a tedious and largely thankless effort. Still, putting ordinary Americans first is not “MAGA” — but a call to self-respect.

If we fail to save ourselves, we can’t be the “land of opportunity” for anyone else.

As the late John F. Kennedy put it, “Ask not what your country can do for you — but what you can do for your country”. What we can do for our country in this moment is to recognize that the uniparty reflects corporatist-globalist interests. Were the DSA to become mainstream, it too would become loathe to bite the establishment hand that feeds it. Therefore, if “radical realism” entails understanding that the real work does not occur primarily within the bounds of the establishment, we must be content to lobby in the marketplace of ideas — to become united in a way the establishment fears most: the grassroots.

In the age of globalization, the problem is not that we have failed to grow governments big enough to achieve ambitious goals. To the contrary, Big Government is the flip side of the Big Business coin — emblematic of the “too big to care” internationalism that has left many behind. Granting governments more power to nationalize corporations and redistribute wealth has not worked in places where it has been tried — places that, unlike Scandinavia, self-identify with the socialist-communist labeling.

What have we not tried in living memory?

Human-scaling our institutions as a means to combat bureaucratic inertia.

Leveling the playing field between the individual and larger-than-life institutions by means of effective incentives and checks-and-balances is not only doable but the entire point. Shared objectives necessarily include addressing Dark Money in politics, particularly in light of the fact that social movements have increasingly been subject to the unseen hand of foreign adversaries. Passing the Save America Act (voter ID) is another critical component of securing our future. Countering the subversive argument that it is “white supremacy” to have borders (immigration enforcement), comprises the third rail. After all, there is no such thing as national sovereignty in the absence of core functions of government.

For as much as we crave instant gratification, improving quality of life is not the work of a single lifetime. Previous generations sacrificed so that we could enjoy more freedom and a better standard of living — and by in large succeeded.

Now it is our turn.

Structural reforms may not be sexy — but the only way to put our house back in order is brick by brick.

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SOURCES

The Trump Economy: Less Hiring as a Record 105 Million Americans Sit Outside Labor Force | IBT

Fake Degrees Put H1-B Visa Fraud Back in the Spotlight | The Dallas Express

Federal Bill Would Probe AI Use, Focus in the Workplace | Government Technology

Hidden Workers, Untapped Talent | Harvard Business School (PDF)

AI Hiring Tools May be Filtering Out the Best Job Applicants | BBC

Gen Z is Working Hard, but the Economy is Putting the American Dream Out of Reach for Many | Fox News

I’m 52 and Can No Longer Find a Full-Time Job | Business Insider

Social Security’s Newest Problem is Seniors Can’t Find Jobs | Newsweek

What’s Really Behind America’s Male Recession? | The Hill

This is Why Tech Employees are Quitting over Return-to-Office Mandates | The Tech Edvocate

The Great People Shortage is Coming and it’s Going to Cause Global Economic Chaos | Business Insider

Countries with the Lowest Birthrates: The Nations Slowly Disappearing | World Population Clock

Who’s Really Funding the Socialist Movement in the United States? | Creators

The DSA Platform Would Destroy American Democracy | Washington Monthly

The Cloward-Piven Strategy Playbook: How Activists Overwhelm the System for Power | Sam Wilks

Wealthy Donors are Hiding Money in Secretive Nonprofits | New York Times