Do you think Trump is anti-immigration?

Democrats, Marxists, and Social Justice Warriors all claim that Donald Trump is opposed to immigration.  Many libertarians and Objectivists agree.  Many of these people believe that this is obvious because Trump has acted to prevent the flood of illegal aliens from crossing our borders that had taken place during the Biden administration.  Mind you, Congress has created immigration laws which were signed by previous Presidents.  It is the duty of the current President to enforce those laws.

There are good reasons why the immigration laws create a process of evaluation for those we allow to reside in the USA.  Terrorists, murderers, thieves, slavers, rapists, child molesters, and those who would wind up on the welfare rolls of a country already deeply in debt are all very reasonably considered undesirables or even Deplorables.  Many a Democrat believes that most Republicans are Deplorables, so surely the above enumerated undesirable immigrants must qualify as Deplorables.

Wait.  Judgments are made in a context.  Democrats have a different context for their evaluation of immigration.  For Democrats, a Deplorable is someone who is not dependent upon government and therefore not easily controlled.  So these undesirable immigrants are actually quite desirable in the eyes of those who lust for power.  No one lusts for power more than the Democrat, Marxist, Social Justice Warrior elitists.  The quest for power justifies any act.

Is there a basis for people who are not lunatics to believe that Trump is anti-immigration?  On the surface, his implementation of a $100,000 fee for H-1B visas appears to justify a belief that Trump is anti-immigrant.  Let us consider this evaluation with some care.

The H-1B visa program allows people with special skills, generally based on years of education, to reside in the USA for 3 years.  They may renew their H-1B visa for another 3 years.  There is a lottery to apply for an H-1B visa for those who would work for a for-profit company.  Non-profits, universities, and federal laboratory candidates do not have to be filtered and limited by the lottery.  There is a general lottery of 65,000 visa applications for those with a bachelor's degree or higher.  There is a smaller lottery of 20,000 for those applicants with master's degrees or higher which were awarded by U.S. accredited universities.  In Fiscal 2025, there were 343,981 registrations for the opportunity to apply for the H-1B visa.  There were about 120,000 selections.  First off, there are many more nationals of other countries who have master's degrees or higher than 20,000 and there are many more total registrants than there are total slots available.  The $100,000 fee did not apply to these 2025 applicants.  It will apply in 2026, but not to those foreign nationals who are already legally in the USA.  Most of them have graduated from U.S. universities.  One of the main consequences of Trump's changes to the program is that the foreign nationals who are already legally in the USA and who have been educated here, will be much less likely to be forced to leave the USA because someone who is not already here is being brought into the U.S. to work.  About 250,000 international students graduate from U.S. universities each year.  There are almost certain to be more than 120,000 registrants for H-1B visas from these students in 2026.  The number of H-1B visas awarded will not be very different after the Trump changes than before them.

In fact, Trump made it very clear to Laura Ingraham, who hates the H-1B visa program, that he sees a need for the special skills of H-1B visa holders.  I fully agree with Trump on this.  I have sponsored four scientists for H-1B visas over the years to work for my laboratory.  I currently have one Ph.D. scientist on my staff who is awaiting word on his application, which appears to have been delayed by the government "shut-down."

Laura Ingraham, J. D. Vance, and other Republicans who oppose the program commonly cite the idea that there are plenty of American residents who can meet all of our technical and scientific needs without foreign workers.  I have news for you.  Getting a Ph.D. in the hard sciences is a much tougher challenge and much more work than most Americans wish to undertake.  The IQ requirement is very high to begin with and the U.S. population compared to the world population is about 4%.  Laura, this means that there are many more high IQ people in the rest of the world than there are in the USA.  Yes, we more than hold our own on a per capita basis, but we are foolish to not import as much of the intelligence and dedication to professional skill development that the rest of the world can offer us.  The people we keep in the USA under the H-1B visa program have proven to be so productive that they have raised the standard of living for all Americans.  These are people we should welcome with open arms.

There have been abuses in the H-1B program by some companies.  Trump has been addressing some of those abuses.  The $100,000 fee on hires from outside the USA is one way he is addressing the abuses.  There is a claim that companies pay H-1B visa holders less than they pay comparable Americans.  This is not the case for my laboratory.  I am required by the Department of Labor to pay my present applicant more than I pay my American scientists.  In addition to that, I had to pay application fees and lawyer fees and put in tens of hours of my own time to do the voluminous paperwork for his application.  Believe me, if I could find a comparable American citizen scientist, I would find it much easier and more profitable to hire him (or her).

I would like to see the U.S. immigration law be more welcoming of immigrants than it is.  I do believe in a vetting process.  Open borders is not a viable option for a country with concern for the safety of its people and when that country is substantially a welfare state in extreme debt.  We benefit from immigrants who are committed to being productive.  Productivity is a necessary measure of merit. I think Trump realizes this.

How to Change a Society from a Largely Free Democratic Republic to a Fascist Socialist Totalitarian State

1.  Divide individuals by gender, by ethnicity, by wealth and income, by education, by age, and by sexuality; 

2.  Pit one group against another using the force of government to provide unearned rewards to some at the expense of others by putting limits on the rights of individuals to earn a living, limiting their freedom of association, and their freedom to cooperate with one another; 

3.  Thereby, creating distrust and hatred as the factions fight to control the government that insists on hurting many, making it a threat to all, thereby making it a matter of life and death for each group to control the government;

4.  Watch a country that once honored merit in the market place, but became an unlimited democracy, succumb to greed for the unearned with the development of ever more special interest groups dependent upon government largess;

5.  The government-run and funded education system becomes a tool promoting more and more government powers, seeks to suppress all private education alternatives, seeks to suppress individual rights especially freedom of speech and the freedom of the press or media, promotes the collective rights of some groups at the expense of the rights of the individuals in other groups, and promotes versions of the country's prior history that diverge ever more from the truth such that more and more power and money flow to the government and the education system;

6. In which a majority coalition of those who have less wealth and want government forced transfers of wealth to themselves and those who most lust for power turn the country into a socialist, fascist country (very poor, primitive countries usually turn communist instead);

7. Which in turn comes to be ruled by the most brutal elements of the power lusters with a total loss of individual rights.

I read William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich the summer after the 9th grade and came to understand most of this.  I think I understood some of these lessons better than Shirer did.  There have been many further examples of this process since WWII.

Here is a very interesting analysis video of what we are presently facing based on a young woman's experience during the disintegration of Yugoslavia.

Obama Calls for More Spending on Education, But Does More Spending Improve Education?

In the last debate, Obama said that a cornerstone to recovery from the never-ending Great Socialist Recession was an increase in federal spending on education.  This he says is critical to improving the economy.

Now, we can all agree that an American population of thinking individuals with a broad and accurate knowledge base and excellent problem-solving skills would be a major economic factor.  One can even imagine an education system based on sound principles which might do a better job of educating the People if it had more money.  However, the present American education system gives no evidence that spending more money on education has any beneficial effect upon the knowledge base of Americans and on their development of critical thinking skills.  Let us examine the recent history of total spending on education:

Since 1981 there has been an almost 6-fold increase in education spending in the U.S.  To be sure, if we believe that education spending should be proportional to the GDP, then this is only a 23% increase in spending as a proportion of GDP.  In 1981, education spending was about 6.4% of GDP and in 2010 it was 7.9% of GDP.  However, the student population has not grown at anything like the rate of the growth in GDP, so one should be able to expect an equal level of educational results with a decreasing fraction of the GDP being devoted to education.  The trend is clearly in the wrong direction.

There are very fundamental reasons why the massively increased spending on education and on a per pupil basis has not resulted in any significant increase in student knowledge and thinking skills.  In almost every community, the local school labor unions assemble a slate of Board of Education members who appear to have good education credentials and their election is backed by lots of union money.  This slate wins almost every position on the school boards.  Because of this and the power of the teachers unions in also greatly influencing the election of city and county officials, the schools are managed for the benefit of the teachers labor unions, not for the education of the children.  Increasing the pay and  benefits of teachers who are blue-collar union members unable to even negotiate their own pay and benefits with their employer, guarantees that few of them will have the teaching skills, knowledge, self-confidence, and managerial skills needed by a professional educator.  Union members are not picked and not rewarded for their teaching professionalism.  Of course, as so often happens when a con is being performed, teachers present bogus certifications proclaiming them experts in teaching.

We have government-run schools specifically because Progressives saw them as a means to indoctrinate children to believe that big and socialist government was needed and moral.  Of course a government-run school could be counted upon to advance the never-ending quest of governments for power.  Such government schools could be counted upon to subvert the American Principle that government should be highly limited and only act to protect the equal, sovereign rights of the individual to life, liberty, property, the ownership of one's own mind, body, and labor, and to the pursuit of personal happiness.  Thus, government-run schools have become increasingly anti-American even as they became the dominant force in the education of American children.  The general viewpoint of American government-run school teachers is well-aligned with the socialist and extreme environmentalist viewpoints of Obama.  It is opposed to a healthy and robust private sector in which Americans should be free to exercise their freedom of association to cooperate with others to achieve their self-chosen goals.  The government-run schools are generally bastions of Progressivism and opponents of Capitalism.

Despite the large increases in education spending, we have not seen an increased ability of American young people to perceive reality and understand it.  In fact, they are more and more removed from reality and less and less capable of performing real productive work in the private sector without more and more massive training efforts by private businesses.  Few students graduate with a proper respect for those with the skills and motivation to produce in our society.  Few are able to communicate well and solve problems well.  Despite our spending more and more and spending far more of our GDP on education than does almost any other country, we keep losing ground to other countries in rankings of educational attainment.  It could not be more clear that we are throwing our education dollars into a black hole.

Marcos Cordero in an article called The Link Between Unemployment Rates and the Lack of Qualified Professionals in America notes that

The Defense Department found that 75 percent of Americans age 17 to 24 are not qualified to serve in the armed forces. In fact, 30 percent of the high school graduates who take the Armed Forces Qualification Test, a test of basic reading and math skills, fail it.

A very fundamental reform of American education is desperately needed and it will not come from government.  Governments are only eager to increase their power and politicians are easily bought by the massive teachers union money accumulated as the government automatically deducts union dues from teachers paychecks.  Labor unions and government increasingly see their interests to be largely in common and the interests of students and good governance are not now able to compete with them.  Only when the People understand these problems and massively rebel will there be any real hope of fixing this problem.

But most of the American People are largely in a feel good mode on education.  Because labor union members provide children with inflated grades, most parents think their child is doing well in school and they are inclined to assume that that means that they are actually learning.  The labor union policy of easy grading and of placing few demands on students lulls the parents and students to sleep.  Until parents and students wake up to the fact that they are being poorly educated and heavily indoctrinated in socialism and extreme environmentalism, America will continue to go downhill.  Obama is happy to push us down that hill.

Making ObamaCare a Power-Luster's Dream

As the 137 agencies and panels are set up and start issuing their many rulings on who will receive health care and who will not and at what cost, the total package of power manipulations of our lives by bureaucrats and politicians will become more clear.  But we have already seen states and certain health care operations acquire special treatment for political reasons in the maneuvers to get the votes to pass the unread, unconstitutional legislation in a most unseemly rush to exert the power of the Democrat Socialist Party.

Since that time, we have seen the Obama Department of Health and Human Services grant 1,372 waivers of a provision of ObamaCare.  These waivers are for one year of the medical expense limit requirements, which are higher than those many company or union health plans now offer.  They can be applied for annually through 2014.  These waivers have been granted to hundreds of union locals, despite the unions being the most vociferous of ObamaCare supporters when it was being considered in Congress.  Apparently many union locals changed their minds when they had a chance to actually read it afterward.  Or were the unions assured ahead of time that they would be granted such waivers as they wanted, seeing as how they were such munificent contributors to the election of the Democrat Socialists?  It is hard to know with this most open and transparent group of political operatives who were running the show in the 2010 Congress and the Obama gang.  Oh, did I say open and transparent?  Sorry that must have stuck in my mind from the election campaign that put these Democrat Socialists in control of our government and they thought of our lives.  I meant to say in this closed, deep-caved, murky regime of moles and voles.

These waivers now cover 3.1 million people.  The Daily Caller reports that:

Of the 204 new Obamacare waivers President Barack Obama’s administration approved in April, 38 are for fancy eateries, hip nightclubs and decadent hotels in House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s Northern California district.

That’s in addition to the 27 new waivers for health care or drug companies and the 31 new union waivers Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services approved.

Now there are 435 Congressional districts and each has about the same number of Americans in the district.  If 204 waivers were granted equally among these districts, the distribution should average 0.47 per district.  But, somehow, surely just a statistical anomaly, the district of Nancy Pelosi, the ObamaCare prime mover through the House of Representatives, just happened to get 38 waivers or 81 times her district's equal share of waivers.  God must be loading the dice when he sees that the good people of Pelosi's district are so willing to delegate powers to the federal government that they elected this good, god-favored woman to Congress.  But I, not being much of a god-fearer, must note that this is a severe injustice in a nation of sovereign, equal individuals with full rights to life, liberty, property, the ownership of their minds and bodies, and the pursuit of their personal happiness.  This is the hand of tyranny and it should be no more tolerated than when that hand was the actually lighter hand of King George III.  Under Democrat Socialist rule, there is no such thing as equal individual rights.  No, those are traded for status as either a crony to a powerful politician or the status of the Forgotten Man.  Most of us are forgotten.  I certainly am, unless I am on their enemies list.

One of the remarkable things about the companies getting waivers from Nancy Pelosi's district is that they were expensive, high-end restaurants, hotels, spas, night clubs, and car dealerships.  Apparently many other Congressional districts did not get so many waivers because they just do not have enough wealthy business establishments to compete with Pelosi's San Francisco crony mercantilism companies.  Unless maybe, just maybe, these businesses have special tutoring in how to take advantage of the overly complex and overly belligerent Washington power brokerage system that ordinary Americans will never figure out.  Of course, a call from the office of Nancy Pelosi to HHS head Kathleen Sebelius in her murky subterranean den probably does not hurt either.